I’m having trouble uploading an SRT file – no matter what I do, it keeps saying it’s an invalid file. It is in Russian, trying to translate to English.
Sorry for the trouble Sophie. Any chance you could email me that subtitle file or point me to a URL from where I can download that subtitle file? Only a portion of that subtitle file (first 100 or so lines) would be enough to isolate and fix the problem.
Hello, I have completed some translations for which I need the invoice. I didn’t log in before doing the translations, so I don’t have the invoice in the user portal. Is there any solution?
If you are using paid translation, you normally also get an email with the link to invoice and to download the subtitles file. If you can’t locate that email, please let me know either your PayPal email address (from which payment was made) and/or the name of the subtitle file so that I can locate the order. I can then send you that Invoice again.
Actually, it looks like I was able to find some translations from your company email address. I have sent the invoices for these to your email. Please let me know if need anything else.
Hi there, currently I’m trying to translate 123 files in total, the first 40 went fine but from that point onwards things started breaking. Translations getting stuck, errors, etc… Can you help me investigate?
Sorry for the trouble Stonk! I’m more than happy to help. I have already replied you via your email query, but please let me know if run into any other issues.
A question? When I pay for the “chatgpt translator” subscription, can the translation only be done once? Because I want to translate another file but it says I have to pay again😅😅😅😅😐
Hi Elwaza, sorry, I don’t think I fully understand your question. Is it that you want to use your own OpenAI subscription account for these translations? If yes, sorry, this is not yet supported. But I will definitely think about it opening to users with their own subscriptions.
However, if the query is that you want to pay (set a credit) once and then keep using it for any future translations. Yes, this one is already supported. Please check this article: https://blog.syedgakbar.com/why-sign-in-and-topup-balance/
I just wanted to say, this was a godsend. I tried to set up a script to do auto-translate myself but I kept running into ratelimits. I didn’t want to bother with batch requests either, so this became the holy grail for me. Thank you so much!!
I paid for translation. The money was deducted from my account, but the system did not confirm the payment and the subtitles were not translated. What should I do?
Sorry for the trouble there. You paid via PayPal? If you can provider either the PayPayl order, your email or the Full name – just something to identity the order/payment, I can look into what went wrong there.
Don’t you worry at all. In case of any problems, you will either get full refund or your translation – whatever you prefer!
Good morning Akbar
Thank you very much for the detailed answer, which now explains a lot to me.
First of all, I must emphasise that the translation quality of your website in general is simply brilliant (especially German and Portuguese for me). I’ve already tried a few tools, but none of these AI translation tools can hold a candle to you. As far as my problem with the time “shifts” that sometimes occur, it actually depends a lot on the type of srt subtitle. Most subtitles have no or hardly any disturbing “distortions”, only with a few subtitles this irregularity is stronger (with all the variants you suggested).
For example: 2024-10-14 11:37:18; Order Balance_Translation JIt5Trx7buJXXXX
But as you have already mentioned yourself: as a rule, the temporal “distortions” are hardly disturbing. Above all, I didn’t realise why these circumstances occurred in different translation lines for each new translation.
Best regards and once again thank you very much
Matthias
Thanks for getting back to me and for you understanding. I’m glad that you are finding generally this tool of value and of help.
Thanks for sharing the subtitle order with problem, with line numbering. I will definitely explore this and will see if I can somehow tweak the translation prompt and/or split/join algorithm to further improve this.
As always, if run into any issues or have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach me.
Hello, recently there have been increasing issues with timing irregularities in subtitle translations. This means that, without any specific logical pattern, the translated subtitles shift in time compared to the original, for example, by 3 seconds. And suddenly, after a certain amount of time, they shift back to the original. This “shifting” happens at irregular intervals. I have tried all options with ChatGPT and Gemini, and with all translations (from English to German), these irregularities occur, but they are always different with each new translation. This phenomenon has only started appearing about two weeks ago. I am stuck. Is there a solution or explanation for this?
Thank you for reporting this back to me and sorry for the trouble. First of all if you can point me to one example file (order number, filename, etc) where you have noticed these issues, I would try to dig deeper and see if I can improve that particular csae.
That said, this has always been problem with these LLM models for translation tasks. Which is worst in some files, while lot better in other. Here are few suggestions to improve this (you can see these by clicking on the Cog icon next to model selector dropdown):
1) Try changing the Temperature to a lower value say 0 or 1.
2) Try changing the Translation Model to Per-Line or Auto-Line to see if this improve results.
I know its not ideal, but if only 5% of the translation goes bad, hopefully this is not super inconvenenice.
FYI, the reason this happen is that for best translation quality (to maintain correct flow and context), before translating, I remove all the timing info and make it a single paragraph. Once the translation is done, it’s split back to original lines. To correctly split the content to original lines, I added a timing markers in between text. Sometime, these timing markers are removed by Gemini or OpenAI making it very hard to associate the translated lines back to original one. I do have some clever algorithm to detect and fix that as much as possible, but it’s not yet perfect. I keep trying to improve this one and will give this another look again.
Hi Zach, the .SUB files are indeed supported. However, it’s possible that the file you are trying to upload is either damaged or I have a bug in my implementation of the SUB file parser where it’s rejecting an otherwise valid SUB file. Would it be possible for you to share the SUB file with which you are having trouble? So that I can isolate and fix this issue properly.
I just realized what one issue might be. Is it possible to make the max file size any bigger? I’m trying to use .sub files extracted from DVDs but they seem to be all too big
If they are really big, these might not be actually the SUB text file, but rather some other format. There are few online tools to convert subtitles file from one text format to other e.g. SUB to SRT. Can you please try these tools and see if they convert your SUB file to any other compatible format?
I’ve always used this service with satisfaction, but since yesterday, after getting the correct translation, it seems I’m unable to get the .srt file. When i click on “Save as” I get this answer: “The file save operation failed to establish a connection to the Open and Save Panel service”.
Sorry for the trouble Alfredo. I don’t think this error message is due to any of my server. Is it possible that you recently installed some browser extension (or a downloader) which is somehow causing this downloading to fail? Can you please try with any other recent browser like FireFox or Chrome? If the issue persist, I would also recommend running the website in Incognito mode as it normally disables most of the user extensions.
Interesting and thanks for sharing with me. On a quick scan, it looks like they don’t offer an API service for their translation widget. Which is critical for smooth integration in my current website architecture. I will try reaching out to their support and see if they can provide some option to automate this. If there is way, I will try to integrate it soon.
Unfortunately, no. For the tree translations, currently the changes are not saved if you exit/close the page. I plan to work on enhancement soon which will keep automatic backups even for the free mode.
Hi Akbar. I’m trying to process some .ass subtitles, and some lines the \N command disapear. So on watching, the subtitles get out of the screen. I tried with chatgpt mini and gemini,giving instructions and such, but both have the same problem. Can you help me?
Thanks for trying these and sorry for the trouble. Unfortunately, these LLM modes (Chat-GPT or Gemini) are prune to get slightly off track and ignore some prompt instruction from time to time. I already internally include prompt to not remove (and retain) any line breaks, but as you can see, it sometime ignores these instruction when processing few subtitle blocks. The few workarounds I can think of is are:
1) There are some online tools, which allows you to wrap the subtitles. There are pretty good chances that the video player you are using also has some settings to auto wrap the rows.
2) Other option could be that you can first replace \N characters with some other markers like {br} in the source subtitle. Then add prompt instruction to retain this tag/marker, and after translation, replace this tag with \N. I know it’s not that smooth options, but may be good for some large translations.
3) Also, do you know you can also manually edit and add any line breaks after translation is done? If you don’t have lot of line skipping instances, this might be the fastest fix going forward. You can read more about this here: https://blog.syedgakbar.com/subtitles-translator-help-tips/
I hope this help. Sorry for not providing a direct fix, and I will keep working on improving this process to get rid of any annoyances like this one.
Hi, Akbar. Please check my account. I processed 4 SRT files using OpenAI GPT-4o mini, and it translated 100% of the first file, but only 50% of the subsequent files. This is the first time I’ve encountered this issue. Thank you!
Sorry for the trouble there. The LLM models sometime gets confused on particular content and may skip translations. If you run into this in future, please try with any other translator e.g. Gemini or DeepL and see how it goes.
Note: I have initiated a full refund for these partial translations.
Hi
I have used the program for yers without problems. Now I can no longer upload .SRT Message: Subtitel file parsing failed with message: invalid time format at line#: 2; Line:
Sorry for the trouble. I tweaked the SRT parser few days ago to handle some blank lines in between subtitles. It’s possible that I have broke the parser for some other patterns. Can you please share with me the subtitle file with which you are having trouble? If yes, please email that to [email protected].
Thanks, but I think this one is already supported. You can enter your custom prompt/instruction by clicking the “Configure” icon next to the OpenAI Model selection dropdown, and then in expanded options click “Edit prompt extension” pencil icon. You can then typing in custom prompt in “Additional instructions or hits” in the prompt dialog.
I hope this helps. If run into any issues or have further queries, please let me know.
When translate with ChatGPT, can you add the From Language: Norwegian. If possible “norsk bokmål” and “norsk nynorsk”, the two official languages in Norway. Instead of the “Auto Detect” to specify the subtitles source language.
Regards Tor
Hello I have an issue with deepl translation, I believe it’s parsing the lines wrongly.
Unfortunately, the translation process failed with the following error:
Error: Invalid time format at line#: 1413; Line: –>
I will be shortly looking into this. If this is a server problem, your money will be refunded in next 1-2 days. If it’s not, please contact me ASAP. In case of any further questions or queries, please feel free to contact me and mention your order#3UD30499XXXX.
Sorry for the trouble there. This has been reported by some others in past as well, but I’m never able to reproduce this issue. Would it be possible for you to send me a copy of the subtitles file for debugging/isolation?
It worked! Thank you, Akbar.
I’m having trouble uploading an SRT file – no matter what I do, it keeps saying it’s an invalid file. It is in Russian, trying to translate to English.
Sorry for the trouble Sophie. Any chance you could email me that subtitle file or point me to a URL from where I can download that subtitle file? Only a portion of that subtitle file (first 100 or so lines) would be enough to isolate and fix the problem.
Regards, Akbar
thanks
Error login
Sorry for the trouble Fajar. I’m looking into this one and will have update shortly once this issue is resolved.
Regards, Akbar
This issue should now be resolved and sign-in should be working as normal. Thank you all for your patience.
Regards, Akbar
Hello, I have completed some translations for which I need the invoice. I didn’t log in before doing the translations, so I don’t have the invoice in the user portal. Is there any solution?
If you are using paid translation, you normally also get an email with the link to invoice and to download the subtitles file. If you can’t locate that email, please let me know either your PayPal email address (from which payment was made) and/or the name of the subtitle file so that I can locate the order. I can then send you that Invoice again.
Regards, Akbar
Actually, it looks like I was able to find some translations from your company email address. I have sent the invoices for these to your email. Please let me know if need anything else.
Regards, Akbar
how to save selected languages fhor the next translation
It normally saves the language selection in your browser local storage for auto restore. What translator you are using?
Regards, Akbar
Hi there, currently I’m trying to translate 123 files in total, the first 40 went fine but from that point onwards things started breaking. Translations getting stuck, errors, etc… Can you help me investigate?
Sorry for the trouble Stonk! I’m more than happy to help. I have already replied you via your email query, but please let me know if run into any other issues.
Regards, Akbar
A question? When I pay for the “chatgpt translator” subscription, can the translation only be done once? Because I want to translate another file but it says I have to pay again😅😅😅😅😐
Hi Elwaza, sorry, I don’t think I fully understand your question. Is it that you want to use your own OpenAI subscription account for these translations? If yes, sorry, this is not yet supported. But I will definitely think about it opening to users with their own subscriptions.
However, if the query is that you want to pay (set a credit) once and then keep using it for any future translations. Yes, this one is already supported. Please check this article:
https://blog.syedgakbar.com/why-sign-in-and-topup-balance/
Regards, Akbar
I just wanted to say, this was a godsend. I tried to set up a script to do auto-translate myself but I kept running into ratelimits. I didn’t want to bother with batch requests either, so this became the holy grail for me. Thank you so much!!
Thanks for the feedback Stonk. I’m glad you are finding this of help.
Regards, Akbar
I paid for translation. The money was deducted from my account, but the system did not confirm the payment and the subtitles were not translated. What should I do?
Hi Jonek,
Sorry for the trouble there. You paid via PayPal? If you can provider either the PayPayl order, your email or the Full name – just something to identity the order/payment, I can look into what went wrong there.
Don’t you worry at all. In case of any problems, you will either get full refund or your translation – whatever you prefer!
Regards, Akbar
Good morning Akbar
Thank you very much for the detailed answer, which now explains a lot to me.
First of all, I must emphasise that the translation quality of your website in general is simply brilliant (especially German and Portuguese for me). I’ve already tried a few tools, but none of these AI translation tools can hold a candle to you. As far as my problem with the time “shifts” that sometimes occur, it actually depends a lot on the type of srt subtitle. Most subtitles have no or hardly any disturbing “distortions”, only with a few subtitles this irregularity is stronger (with all the variants you suggested).
For example: 2024-10-14 11:37:18; Order Balance_Translation JIt5Trx7buJXXXX
But as you have already mentioned yourself: as a rule, the temporal “distortions” are hardly disturbing. Above all, I didn’t realise why these circumstances occurred in different translation lines for each new translation.
Best regards and once again thank you very much
Matthias
Hi Matthias,
Thanks for getting back to me and for you understanding. I’m glad that you are finding generally this tool of value and of help.
Thanks for sharing the subtitle order with problem, with line numbering. I will definitely explore this and will see if I can somehow tweak the translation prompt and/or split/join algorithm to further improve this.
As always, if run into any issues or have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach me.
Regards, Akbar
Hello, recently there have been increasing issues with timing irregularities in subtitle translations. This means that, without any specific logical pattern, the translated subtitles shift in time compared to the original, for example, by 3 seconds. And suddenly, after a certain amount of time, they shift back to the original. This “shifting” happens at irregular intervals. I have tried all options with ChatGPT and Gemini, and with all translations (from English to German), these irregularities occur, but they are always different with each new translation. This phenomenon has only started appearing about two weeks ago. I am stuck. Is there a solution or explanation for this?
Hi Matthias,
Thank you for reporting this back to me and sorry for the trouble. First of all if you can point me to one example file (order number, filename, etc) where you have noticed these issues, I would try to dig deeper and see if I can improve that particular csae.
That said, this has always been problem with these LLM models for translation tasks. Which is worst in some files, while lot better in other. Here are few suggestions to improve this (you can see these by clicking on the Cog icon next to model selector dropdown):
1) Try changing the Temperature to a lower value say 0 or 1.
2) Try changing the Translation Model to Per-Line or Auto-Line to see if this improve results.
If nothing works, you can also manually shift down/up problematic rows or re-translate these (free of cost). You can read more about this:
https://blog.syedgakbar.com/subtitles-translator-help-tips/#shift-rows
I know its not ideal, but if only 5% of the translation goes bad, hopefully this is not super inconvenenice.
FYI, the reason this happen is that for best translation quality (to maintain correct flow and context), before translating, I remove all the timing info and make it a single paragraph. Once the translation is done, it’s split back to original lines. To correctly split the content to original lines, I added a timing markers in between text. Sometime, these timing markers are removed by Gemini or OpenAI making it very hard to associate the translated lines back to original one. I do have some clever algorithm to detect and fix that as much as possible, but it’s not yet perfect. I keep trying to improve this one and will give this another look again.
Regards,
Akbar
Hi, is it not possible to upload .sub files? It says it’s one of the supported formats but it fails to upload every time
Hi Zach, the .SUB files are indeed supported. However, it’s possible that the file you are trying to upload is either damaged or I have a bug in my implementation of the SUB file parser where it’s rejecting an otherwise valid SUB file. Would it be possible for you to share the SUB file with which you are having trouble? So that I can isolate and fix this issue properly.
Regards, Akbar
I’ll try and share it later when I get back to my computer. Is it possible you need a .idx file?
No, just the plain .sub file should be enough to reproduce the issue.
Regards, Akbar
I just realized what one issue might be. Is it possible to make the max file size any bigger? I’m trying to use .sub files extracted from DVDs but they seem to be all too big
If they are really big, these might not be actually the SUB text file, but rather some other format. There are few online tools to convert subtitles file from one text format to other e.g. SUB to SRT. Can you please try these tools and see if they convert your SUB file to any other compatible format?
Regards, Akbar
I’ve always used this service with satisfaction, but since yesterday, after getting the correct translation, it seems I’m unable to get the .srt file. When i click on “Save as” I get this answer: “The file save operation failed to establish a connection to the Open and Save Panel service”.
Sorry for the trouble Alfredo. I don’t think this error message is due to any of my server. Is it possible that you recently installed some browser extension (or a downloader) which is somehow causing this downloading to fail? Can you please try with any other recent browser like FireFox or Chrome? If the issue persist, I would also recommend running the website in Incognito mode as it normally disables most of the user extensions.
If the issue persist, please let me know.
Regards, Akbar
I found a translation page : https://neuralwriter.com/hu/translate-tool/en-hu/
Is it possible to integrate in the dst ?
Interesting and thanks for sharing with me. On a quick scan, it looks like they don’t offer an API service for their translation widget. Which is critical for smooth integration in my current website architecture. I will try reaching out to their support and see if they can provide some option to automate this. If there is way, I will try to integrate it soon.
Regards, Akbar
Hi, I mistakenly exited the page in which I was translating the subtitles. Is there no way to retrieve them?
Unfortunately, no. For the tree translations, currently the changes are not saved if you exit/close the page. I plan to work on enhancement soon which will keep automatic backups even for the free mode.
Regards, Akbar
Hi Akbar. I’m trying to process some .ass subtitles, and some lines the \N command disapear. So on watching, the subtitles get out of the screen. I tried with chatgpt mini and gemini,giving instructions and such, but both have the same problem. Can you help me?
Hi Thiago,
Thanks for trying these and sorry for the trouble. Unfortunately, these LLM modes (Chat-GPT or Gemini) are prune to get slightly off track and ignore some prompt instruction from time to time. I already internally include prompt to not remove (and retain) any line breaks, but as you can see, it sometime ignores these instruction when processing few subtitle blocks. The few workarounds I can think of is are:
1) There are some online tools, which allows you to wrap the subtitles. There are pretty good chances that the video player you are using also has some settings to auto wrap the rows.
2) Other option could be that you can first replace \N characters with some other markers like {br} in the source subtitle. Then add prompt instruction to retain this tag/marker, and after translation, replace this tag with \N. I know it’s not that smooth options, but may be good for some large translations.
3) Also, do you know you can also manually edit and add any line breaks after translation is done? If you don’t have lot of line skipping instances, this might be the fastest fix going forward. You can read more about this here:
https://blog.syedgakbar.com/subtitles-translator-help-tips/
I hope this help. Sorry for not providing a direct fix, and I will keep working on improving this process to get rid of any annoyances like this one.
Regards,
Akbar
Good job bro, thanks your tools
Hi, Akbar. Please check my account. I processed 4 SRT files using OpenAI GPT-4o mini, and it translated 100% of the first file, but only 50% of the subsequent files. This is the first time I’ve encountered this issue. Thank you!
Hi Kazuo,
Sorry for the trouble there. The LLM models sometime gets confused on particular content and may skip translations. If you run into this in future, please try with any other translator e.g. Gemini or DeepL and see how it goes.
Note: I have initiated a full refund for these partial translations.
Regards, Akbar
thank you for your tool sir
Hi
I have used the program for yers without problems. Now I can no longer upload .SRT Message: Subtitel file parsing failed with message: invalid time format at line#: 2; Line:
Same problem with files that earlyer has passed
Kind regards
Niels
Hi Niels,
Sorry for the trouble. I tweaked the SRT parser few days ago to handle some blank lines in between subtitles. It’s possible that I have broke the parser for some other patterns. Can you please share with me the subtitle file with which you are having trouble? If yes, please email that to [email protected].
Regards, Akbar
ok
Can you add a feature to OpenAI GPT that translates based on my prompt?
Thanks, but I think this one is already supported. You can enter your custom prompt/instruction by clicking the “Configure” icon next to the OpenAI Model selection dropdown, and then in expanded options click “Edit prompt extension” pencil icon. You can then typing in custom prompt in “Additional instructions or hits” in the prompt dialog.
I hope this helps. If run into any issues or have further queries, please let me know.
Regards, Akbar
When translate with ChatGPT, can you add the From Language: Norwegian. If possible “norsk bokmål” and “norsk nynorsk”, the two official languages in Norway. Instead of the “Auto Detect” to specify the subtitles source language.
Regards Tor
Sure, I have now added these languages in both the source and target drop-downs for OpenAI ChatGPT models.
Regards, Akbar
Hello I have an issue with deepl translation, I believe it’s parsing the lines wrongly.
Unfortunately, the translation process failed with the following error:
Error: Invalid time format at line#: 1413; Line: –>
I will be shortly looking into this. If this is a server problem, your money will be refunded in next 1-2 days. If it’s not, please contact me ASAP. In case of any further questions or queries, please feel free to contact me and mention your order#3UD30499XXXX.
Ho Andrzej,
Sorry for the trouble there. This has been reported by some others in past as well, but I’m never able to reproduce this issue. Would it be possible for you to send me a copy of the subtitles file for debugging/isolation?
Regards, Akbar