[RESOLVED] Best way to translate Bulgarian or Russian subtitles to English?

[Diana (Cda)]

I've looked all over the net for subtitles in English for "Suspect" (1987, Cher and Dennis Quaid).

I've found only Bulgarian and Russian (link, which I hope works. Tested and works for me: http://www.podnapisi.net/ppodnapisi/search?tbsl=1&asdp=0&sK=Suspect&sM=324292&sJ=0&sY=&sAKA=1).

1. Unfortunately, everything I've tried doesn't work. I went online and found out how to translate the text from Bulgarian to English (converted Bulgarian subtitles to display properly by opening in Word and changing to a Cyrillic font then uploaded to google translation), but the translation only came out about 30% / 70% gibberish and of that 30%, the text was inaccurate to the extreme!

Does anyone know how to either get an accurate translation of these foreign language SRT files?

Or,

2. Or would the other way be to try to get the text out of the WAV that I then would adjust via my subtitling software? I tried to find a way to get the WAV to text from the audio part of the movie. I extracted the audio to a wav file and then tried to find WAV to text software but I wasn't successful this route either.

3. I've been doing the subtitling manually but have run into the problem that some of the dialogue I can't figure out. I also can't find a free script anywhere on the net so I'm stuck yet again.

4. My library doesn't have a copy of the DVD so I can't extract a copy of the subtitles, which is how most subtitles are obtained, I imagine.

So all around, I'm stuck with this one. Any help re finding a solution is very much appreciated.

Either a free script or way to translate the file properly ... I don't know what else to try. Perhaps someone else has run into this type of problem and figured out a solution that works (?).

Thanks. D.

[redwudz]

Electronic text translations to English work only marginally, and that with a language that is similar enough to English to start from. There are a lot of Japanese Anime that are translated to English and that is mostly done by people fluent in both languages that sit down and listen and translate the words. It's a lot of work.

Audio to text speech recognition programs don't work well with movies unless you can isolate the spoken audio. And even with that, accents and noise can throw it off. Most audio to text programs require the program to be 'trained' for the individual speaker, so not much help with movie audio.

Unfortunately, manual subtitling is probably your only option if you can't find English subs, but it would be a monumental project with most movies.

[SLK001]

Don't be put-off by the prospect of having to manual transcribe a soundtrack, because it isn't all that hard. I did all three of the original Star Wars movies from laserdisks. It took me about 2x the length of the movie to complete each subtitle set.

[Diana (Cda)]

This is very discouraging, I must admit.

It's taking a heck of a long time since my copy is an old VHS copy that I copied to DVD and have since transferred to XviD AVI. The trouble is that some of the text is not clear and that's what makes this such a long process. I've already spent a considerable amount of time manually transcribing it but I've come to a portion where I can't make heads or tails in some critical parts of the dialogue.

Unfortunately, I can't find a freeware script anywhere on the net or any solution so far that is helping with this particular movie.

It's just so amazing that subtitles for "Suspect" (1987) can be found in Bulgarian and Russian, but not in English!

Well, if anyone can think of anything useful as a solution, pls advise. My dad doesn't hear well anymore so subtitling is now something I do so that he can enjoy watching my collection of movies along with the rest of us. As long as he has subtitles to read, he's happy.

Thanks.

[ron spencer]

if you were going to rip the subs from a libray copy, why not rent it and rip the subs? Or get a used copy off of ebay

[jman98]

This is not unusual. Remember, "Suspect" is in English and some English language movies simply don't have English subtitles. Heck, I've seen official DVDs of recent American TV shows that completely lack subtitles.

It will be painstaking, but you can translate blocks of text at a time with some online translator. Google's is pretty good. 5+ years ago I used to use a commercial Russian to English translation software. If I remember correctly I used Prompt. All Russian<->English translation programs have problems to a certain extent. Russian uses a double negative and in my experience this is rarely translated correctly by software. I used to use the software for some very quick and dirty translations of personal email sent to me when there were enough words in it that I didn't know that I was going to have to spend more time than I wanted to in looking stuff up in dictionaries. Possession in Russian can be quite bizarre by English standards and sometimes this also fails to translate correctly. Not to mention the weird Russian desire to use the past tense of some verbs of motion to describe events that haven't even happened yet (ie. Russians will say something that basically means "We left", which in English can only refer to something in the past, to say "Let's go" which refers to an event, the leaving, that actually hasn't happened yet.). Anyway, you can give it your best shot, but note that what you get back may not be all that great. I guess it would give you a starting point. I have a 2 part Russian DVD that I bought some years ago with Russian subtitles and there are no English subtitles anywhere of it. I ripped the Russian subs (real painful too to do that) and used Prompt to translate them into English and what I got was pretty bad. I had to spend a lot of time correcting them with a dictionary. Translating them with software did save me some work. Maybe it made it go 20% sooner than doing it all myself as there was some of it that was OK and didn't have to be changed/fixed.

I don't really recommend Prompt as I had some issues with their tech support. Basically I had a fatal disk error on my PC and I had to completely reinstall Windows. They refused to reactive my purchased copy of Prompt and made me buy a new one. I did that once. The next time I had to reinstall Windows (damn Windows for that always having to be done at some point), I decided "Screw this" and I refused to buy Prompt again. So they view their customers as nothing more than thieves and if you have any issues, don't expect much help or sympathy. I've got better things to do with my time and money than deal with that. Also, the next time I had to reinstall my need to translate quickly from Russian to English on a regular basis had stopped, so I could just use Babelfish or something like that for as little as I had to do it.

[Seeker47]

It's just so amazing that subtitles for "Suspect" (1987) can be found in Bulgarian and Russian, but not in English!

This is a general reply -- might not help your specific situation.

There are quite a few sites from which you can d/l subs, in various sub formats and various languages. The problem is that finding what you wanted can be a tedious search process: what you were looking for might in fact be out there, somewhere, but it can take a bit of luck and persistence to find it. There can be multiple movie titles (translated into different languages, as well as alternate titles -- sometimes different titles for different release territories), and you may have to search on all of them. IMDB.Com would be a good source of all the known titles for a movie.

[Diana (Cda)]

Ron, good tip. I never thought of renting the DVD since I don't have any place near me or any card from any dvd rental place, but something to consider for the future if this type of situation ever happens again and my local library doesn't have a DVD copy.

jman98, thanks for the great information. I'll look into it next time I don't find an English translation. Funny how there was Polish and Russian everywhere, but a long and lengthy search over a few days yielded only those 2 languages. Go figure! <shrug><g>

Seeker47, yes. I googled and googled and now have several sites bookmarked but nothing came up. I'm sure somewhere in some obscure corner there may be an English copy but I never found it. A script for the movie would have helped a lot but, it's a moot point now. The file is done. I'll now have to figure out how to upload it once I've checked it straight through again (when we watch the film). Once it's a-okay, I'll upload it to a few sites. Someone else might like the subtitles in English, too <g>.

Ultimately, it took several hours but I figured out that I needed a second subtitling program. DivXLand Media Subtitler is great but it's not good for going back and forth when you're trying to fine-tune the timing in a subtitle. When I have an existing subtitle file, it's good enough but not for writing up a transcript from scratch. It's just doesn't have the precision needed.

VisualSubSync turned out to be cumbersome, what with the whole ripping the wav out and then working with no picture, etc., but in the end, it was "easier" to work from scratch with this one. Then at the end, late last night, I re-opened everything in DivXLand Media Subtitler to finetune the end result. I wish both these apps were together in one, the visual of DivXLand Media Subtitler and the precision of VisualSubSync but at least these 2 freewares allowed me to do the job. Also, DivXLand is good for the "cleanup" of the subtitle since you have the visual which helps finetune the length of time a subtitle stays up. Couldn't see some of that in VisualSubSync and some of the subs winked out too quickly which I could then fix in VSS.

At any rate, dad'll never know how much time I've spent learning how to do all this type of thing for him! But he's just so picky about movies that I'm going through my collection carefully and finding subtitles for them all. And I think he'll like Suspect. Goodness knows he's difficult to please <g>.

Thanks everyone. This was a good exercise. Now, though, things won't be so difficult because I have two apps that seem to do the job okay. Of course, hopefully I won't run into this type of thing too often. Subtitling from scratch takes too much time for me <g>. But at least I now know it can be done! Cheers.

[Diana (Cda)]

I have to take back everything I said about VisualSubSync! I have found this to be an _incredible_ program! I stumbled upon the fact that there _is_ a video option and that it wasn't on by default. (And looking at the webpage this morning, I see that the video is showing right there in the screenshot!! https://www.videohelp.com/tools/VisualSubSync).

Now that I turned on the video, to the right of the wave form, the movie shows up and displays the subtitles upon refreshing any changes I've just made to the project by pressing SAVE (esp. quick via the usual Ctrl+S key combination). Also, you can type along with listening without affecting any of the subtitling text, something the other app didn't let one do! Type something and if speech continued, it would jump you to next line where you'd mess up that part of the subtitling <argghh>!!

This program is absolutely incredible, now. What I loved about it from the very beginning is how you can select parts of the wave and by using various of the playback buttons, it limits the repeating of any particular dialogue to what is selected. So there's a tremendous amount of time saved that all the other subtitling apps didn't allow for with all the back and forth clicking you have to do to keep going back to the part you were transcribing. Tedious and frustrating! And with VSS you can then repeat what you just typed in watching the video to make sure the end result is what you were trying to achieve before moving on and selecting a new portion of the wave file to transcribe!

What is also incredible, for me, is that this is an app I've needed for some time without knowing a solution lay in a subtitling app, of all things! How many times do you want to transcribe verbal notes from a recorder (or now from my Blackberry!) without having an easy way to do it? I can now dictate any information into my Blackberry and then after transferring the wave file can then use this app to type it up, since I haven't yet stopped to do the work involved into getting a speech recognition app I have up and going with all the corrections necessary for it to understand my voice. VisualSubSync can help me till I get to that point! Now with my Blackberry, all these things will be necessary as I start to use the smartphone more for keeping snippets of information that I find any given week that I'd like to keep.

Awesome.

Thanks to everyone's help. In the end I found VisualSubSync to be nearly perfect. The subtitles I did for Suspect didn't come out so great because I used the other app but this second set I'm making for another movie I couldn't find subtitles for is coming out much better now that I'm using VisualSubSync. And what makes it a breeze to work with is that it saves everything as a project file (DivxLand Media Subtitles is woefully lacking there) so that when you launch the project, you're taken right back where you were in both video and subtitle file!

I can recommend this freeware wholeheartedly! Awesome job to the deverloper(s).

[Seeker47]

Diana,

I did not have time to read it, only bookmark it, but Baldrick had a subtitles guide of some kind that either just went up or just got updated within the last couple days. I think it dealt with the use of other subtitle programs. Might be something in that thread of use to you (?)

[handyguy]

Netflix has that film with english subs & closed captions.