About

How to Professionally Translate Subtitles[

Language barriers have been eliminated thanks to subtitles on videos, which gives brands and companies more opportunity to get into international audiences.

Your videos can be seen by a wider audience and will be more visible on social media if you add subtitles to them.

Naturally, having the appropriate tools and methods at your disposal will enable you to quickly translate your subtitles into several languages.

Let me demonstrate how to translate subtitles quickly so that international viewers and people with hearing impairments can more readily appreciate your video material.

The Fundamentals of Subtitle File Formats
The plain text file for the subtitles is saved separately from the video.

This allows us to enable and disable closed captions while watching a YouTube video as necessary.

These text files can have a variety of file extensions encoded, including

SRT / SubRip (.srt)
SubViewer (.sub or .sbv) (.sub or .sbv)
WebVTT (.vtt) (.vtt)
The goal of this post is to explain how to convert an SRT file in a straightforward and understandable manner. Many video sharing websites like YouTube and Facebook allow this file type, which is widely utilized in the industry.

Method #1: To translate subtitles, use Notepad or WordPad.

Whether you have to work without access to the Internet or you need to translate the subtitles for a brief film, this method can be helpful.

if you have a computer file with an SRT subtitle saved.

With a simple text editor like Notepad or WordPad that is preinstalled on most computers, you can translate it. To achieve this,

Create a duplicate of your SRT file.
Make a right-click on the file.
Choose WordPad or Notepad under Open With.
Although I'm using Notepad in this example, your subtitles should resemble these regardless of the word editor you use:

Here's how to interpret a code that could appear to be difficult. Sections of the subtitles are separated according to appearance. Each part includes the items I've highlighted in the screenshot below:

The section number of a subtitle denotes its order (in ascending order from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...)

Start and Finish Times: These times specify when a subtitle should start and end playing in the video (must be written as hour:minute:second,millisecond)
There may be more than one row of subtitles in a sequence when they appear on the screen. 🚨 This is the section that has to be edited and the translation added.
Each part is divided by blank space.

Simply substitute the original subtitles (Item Number 3 in the screenshot above) with their translations to produce a translated version of your SRT subtitle file.

You can either translate them yourself or use any online translator of your choice by copying and pasting the full text into Google Translate (here is a list with the best machine translation software). Next, copy the subtitles that have been translated and put them where they belong.

182. https://www.vingle.net/posts/5616867
183. https://atelierdevosidees.loiret.fr/profiles/transladocs_preseve_/activity
184. https://yamap.com/users/3098826
185. https://www.noteflight.com/profile/993efcd12707d65913957a7be534551554a8adef
186. https://community.windy.com/user/transladocs
187. https://pxhere.com/en/photographer-me/3983206

Be careful not to change the sequence numbers or timestamps because they are necessary for the automatic synchronization of each subtitle to the video.

Here is a comparison of the translated version and my original SRT file:

Vital Information

The manual copying and pasting of the translations from Google Translate into the SRT file makes this process more time-consuming.
Since we're using Notepad to modify the subtitles in their unprocessed state, there is also a chance that we could inadvertently remove crucial data like the timestamps.
Overall, I only advise using this method if you simply need to quickly update or translate a small subtitle file. The next technique I'll demonstrate to you is quicker, simpler, and more effective for translating and controlling the subtitles for your entire video library.
Solution #2: Use an internet program to translate the subtitles

A tool that automatically processes the subtitle text so you don't have to bother about the formatting is an online translation software tool (here is a list of the best translation software in 2022).

I suggest the following four online resources for SRT subtitle files:

Redokun 1.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that I would include our very own Redokun on this list, but I assure you that there are valid justifications for doing so. One of the file types that our cloud-based translation software supports is SRT subtitles, and translating them is straightforward:

Submit your SRT file to Redokun in step 1 and choose your target language (s)

Use the built-in machine translator in step two to translate the subtitles. On Redokun, you have the option of using Google Translate or DeepL.

While though this step is optional, it certainly saves you the trouble of manually copying or typing out the translations.

Step 3: Check and correct the automatically translated subtitles using the online editor, if necessary.

You can always ask someone else with relevant experience to finish this step if you don't speak the target language well. It might be a coworker or an outside supplier.

Step 4: After the translation is finished, grab the SRT file and use it right away on your video!

Extra Advantages

Redokun is a simple-to-use application that you may use to speed up your translation workflow.