[SOLVED] Easiest way to generate SRT from plain text?

[yetanotherlogin]

Hello

Someone kindly translated a video available on YouTube.

Problem is, he didn't write down the start/end times for each caption, so I'm stuck with one big LibreOffice Write file.

Is there a faster way to add this crucial info than copy/pasting the text + video in eg. Aegisub and spending hours timing each caption?

Thank you.

Edit: To avoid the same issue later… Is Aegisub the best tool for translators to create captions while viewing a video? Ideally, it should be cross-platform, so that the OS isn't an impediment.

[sneaker]

Is it really a translation or just a transcription? Youtube provides some auto-translation, auto-transcription and auto-timing features. If it's in the same language you should be able to simply upload the text and let Youtube do the timing. If it's a different language you can try to copy the timings from the youtube transcription to your translation but it will probably not fit 100%.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734796

You say you'd need "hours" to do it manually? I don't know how you do it but it can be done pretty fast with some training: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6zXR6Bg7fU

[yetanotherlogin]

It's a translation, so it looks like YouTube can't use AI to add timecodes. Besides, it says "If you have a subtitle and closed caption file, you can upload it to your video. These types of files contain both the text and time codes for when each line of text should be displayed. Some files also include position and style information, which is especially useful for deaf or hard of hearing viewers."

Thanks for the video. I'll experiment with Aegisub and see how long it takes to add timecodes to that 45mn video.

In the future, in case other translators wanted to contribute: What Windows/Mac application would you recommend to contribute captions + timecodes in one go ?

[sneaker]

It's a translation, so it looks like YouTube can't use AI to add timecodes. Besides, it says "If you have a subtitle and closed caption file, you can upload it to your video. These types of files contain both the text and time codes for when each line of text should be displayed. Some files also include position and style information, which is especially useful for deaf or hard of hearing viewers."

It also says under "Transcribe and auto-sync (original video language only)":

You can transcribe your video and automatically line up your text with the speech in the video. A transcript contains the text of what is said in a video, but no time code information, so you need to set the timing to sync with your video.

Automatic timing for captions
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Note: Since the transcript text is automatically synchronized to your video, the transcript must be in a language supported by our speech recognition technology and in the same language that's spoken in the video. Transcripts are not recommended for videos that are over an hour long or have poor audio quality.

So you could try the auto-transcript and auto-timing feature, extract that time transcription and try to transfer the timing to the un-timed translation. If you're lucky they match with little corrections.

[yetanotherlogin]

Yes, but "(original video language only)": I understand this to mean that the video and the captions use the same langugage, which isn't the case here.

[sneaker]

What I mean:
1. let youtube auto-transcribe (incl. timing) your video (optionally: let it do auto-translation as well)
2. download that auto-transcriptions
3. transfer those timings to your text-only translation

I don't know how well it will work but maybe it's worth a shot.

[yetanotherlogin]

As I expected, it took a couple of hours adding timecodes to a 45mn interview. I also noticed a bug/oddity in Aegisub, where some captions were not displayed although the timecodes looked kosher.

But then, it was mader harder since 1) I had never used Aegisub (and I couldn't figure out how use Subtitle Edit or Subtitle Workshop to paste the original TXT file, and add timecodes), and 2) a lot of captions were too long so had be sliced manually (although, I could have searched for code or a text editor to perform some kung fu prior to importing).

Moral of the story: Instead of using a plain text editor, it's better to use the right tool to create captions.

Thank you.