Translating Subtitles Workflow

[mike26895313nl20]

Happy New Year everyone.

I have to deliver a feature with French subtitles and am wondering what the best worklow is when using an offsite translator. I want to export the English transcript or SRT of the captions, send it to a translator and be able to reimport what they return to me and associate it with the sequence, preserving the timecode reference. 

Would the translator need to edit directly in the SRT file to retain TC metadata, or can it be done somehow using a text editor like Pages or Word? On a time crunch so I want to get it right from jump street.

Thanks!

[Stan Jones · Accepted solution]

Mike,

Happy New Year to you! Sorry this took a couple days to get to.

So far, PR does not have an option that makes this easy. They are actively working on export/import of transcript text that will make round-tripping there easier.

In the meantime, you must either make the translation with the timecodes intact, or use a workaround.If I were keeping the timecodes, I would export using the csv option, copy to a Word table, and instruct the translator to work only in the translation column. I might explore locking the contents of columns they should not change. Then copy that table back into spreadsheet form and use formulas or a macro to create the srt for import to PR. I wonder if simply converting the table to text and a bit search and replace might work.

In the post linked here, I describe a workaround using Subtitle Edit that allows the translation to be put in an all text form:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/problems-with-subtitle/m-p/13463858#M447603

If your subtitles are not single line and you want to try this, let me know.

Let us know what you do!

Stan

[mike26895313nl20]

Thanks. The workaround we're using is to have the translator work with a text file that retains the TC info for reference. I'm going through the translated doc and copy/pasting the translated titles into the text window. Not ideal, but it works.

Some kind of roundtrip solution that retains the metadata would be a huge timesaver for anyone who has to do this sort of thing.

[Stan Jones]

Ouch! But I agree with getting the job out!

Stan