Going through a pile of old music CD’s and other junk in a second hand items shop, I found out a DVD of a well acclaimed French movie “Spoorloos”. Released in 1988, this is a suspense movie about a Dutch couple who are driving through the French country side and suddenly one of them disappears. I was excited to find the movie (and at such a cheap price), but the only problem was that the movie is in French and I don’t really understand French beyond “merci beaucoup”. The subtitles available online for the movie were in other languages like Spanish, German, Italian, Greek etc., but not in English. After a few hours of searching for the English subtitles, I finally thought of translating the subtitles into English using online translator tools from Google or Bing.
The translation of subtitles using Google Translate is a little tricky. Here is how you can translate subtitles for any movie into any languages (supported by Google Translate) you want :
- First of all download the subtitles for your movie from any open source subtitles website. It does not matter what language the subtitles are in, because we are going to translate them anyway. But using subtitles in languages like English, German, Italian, French, Spanish etc., is better as they translate much better.
- The downloaded subtitles file would have an extension .SUB or .SRT or something else. Rename the file so that it has a .TXT extension. This is because Google Translate accepts TXT documents and not the SUB or SRT files.
- Visit Google Translate at http://translate.google.com/ and click on translate a document link at the bottom.
- Click on the Browse button, select the subtitles file having the TXT extension. In the source language select Detect Language and in the destination language, choose whatever language you want the subtitles to be translated into.
- Clicking on the Translate button will show you a complete translation of the subtitles in a few seconds. Press the hotkey Ctrl+S to save the translated file and save it as TXT file (not as webpage).
- Open the translated subtitles file in Notepad++. Press Ctrl+H hotkey to open the Replace window. In the Find box type
->and in the Replace box type-->and then click on the Replace All button. Close the Replace window by clicking on the Close button. In the Notepad++, press Ctrl+S to save the file and change the extension of the saved file to .SRT.
- Now you have subtitles for your own language. You can use this subtitles file in any media player that supports subtitles like VLC Media Player.
Conclusion: There is no need to worry if you cannot find the subtitles of a movie in your own language. You can simply use Google Translate to translate the subtitles in any language into your desired language in a few easy steps.