Subtitles Translator – Help & Tips

Subtitles Editor

When you upload a subtitles file, it’s uploaded on the server to verify it’s valid and then all of the subtitle lines are displayed in the Subtitle Editor section as shown below:

This table shows the corresponding line/row sequence number, From and To timestamps and subtitle text for each subtitle entry. Initially, both the Original and Translated Text columns show the source subtitles, but as you “translate” the subtitles, the translated text will appear in the “Translated Text” column.

Toolbar Actions

Subtitle Editor sections show various toolbar icons above the Original and Translated text columns to let you manipulate the subtitle text before and after translations. These toolbar actions are described below:

Edit Original Subtitle Text

This toggles the editing of the text in the Original Text column. By default only the text in the Translated Text is editable, and that’s to fine-tune to tweak the translation text as machine translations are not always perfect. However, rarely, you may also want to edit the Subtitle text to either fix some typos or change it to help the machine translator understand the overall context better. Once the editing is ON, you can change the text in the column as shown below:

Merge Original and Translated Subtitles

When turned ON, merge the subtitles, so that both downloaded file contains both the original and translated subtitles. When this is active, both the source and translated texts are displayed in the “Translated Text” columns to give you an idea of how the subtitles will appear in the downloaded file:

Once the merge subtitles action is ON, you can also change the direction of whether the Original subtitle is displayed at the top or bottom by clicking the icon displayed at the top of the Text Text column. The video player will then show both original and translated subtitles as shown below:

Left Align Subtitles

Left align the subtitles visually in the editor. This action button is available in both the Source and Translated Text columns and changes the alignment of the text in corresponding columns.

Right Align Subtitles

Right align the subtitles visually in the editor. You can apply this formatting for languages that are read from right to left, like Arabic, Urdu, Hebrew, etc. This action button is also available in both the Source and Translated Text columns and changes the alignment of the text in corresponding columns.

Note that when you have this Right-alignment applied on translated subtitles files and the “Embed Language Bi-Directional codes” Save Setting is also ON, the downloaded subtitles files contain special Unicode Marker characters embedded in each subtitle row so that translated text appears with the correct direction when playing videos with subtitles.

Toggle HTML Display

By default any HTML tags in the subtitles are encoded so that you can visually see and edit these tags. However, for some of the content, it’s much easier and quick if you can visually see the rendered HTML. You toggle the HTML display using this tool-bar icon. For example, here is how the above subtitle file appears with HTML tags turned ON:

Find & Replace Words

Clicking on this icon button opens a dialog where you can type in the words to match and replace as under the “Translated Text” columns only. Here is how this dialog appears:

This Find and Replace feature is pretty powerful and you can control the exact behaviour by toggling the various action icons. These are briefly described below:

• Find & Replace Whole Words Only: This ON by default and will force replacing of whole words only. For example, if you type “For” in the find text area, this will search and replace all occurrences of “For” word, but will not change it if it’s part of another word e.g. “Forgiving” or “Form”, etc.

• Regular Expression Search: When this is ON, it treats the typed string in the find block as Regular Expression. This makes it possible to replace more than one word and pattern. If haven’t already used Regular Expressions, you can read more about them here. One good tool to build and test RegExp is regex101.

• Toggle Case Sensitivity: When turned ON, only matches the words which are in the same case. For example when this flag is ON, and you type “my” in the find block, then it will not match “MY” or “My” words in the translated text columns.

• Replace Multiple Words: When this flag is ON, you can type in a unique word or RegExp pattern per line in the Find and Replace text boxes. Then it will replace the word at the 1st index with the word in the replace block at the 1st index, and similarly will replace the word at the 2nd index with the word in the 2nd index in the replaced block, and so on. You can use this to build a list of all the words that machine translation usually gets wrong and replace these with correct words in a single step.

Subtitles Editing

After the translation is done, you can also manually tweak/refine the translation by clicking on the Translated Text row. This would enable interactive editing of the content as shown below:

You can also bring a single row change dialog by clicking the Pencil icon. Which opens up a dialog where you can review the existing text and change it – similar to Find & Repalce dialog above.

Shift Subtitles Rows
When using some new LLM translators, like Chat-GPT, Gemini, etc, it’s possible that some lines are shifted up or down wrongly. This is because for the translation is performed on these models for best quality. In simple worsds, the way it works is that source subtitles lines are first cleaned and merged into a single paragraph (with some special rows-marker) and then that paragraph is passed to AI model for translation. After the translation, the translated paragraph is split back to match with the source rows based on the special row marker tags.

However, sometimes, the row marker tag is wrongly trimmed by the AI model and thus translated translated content may not align with the corresponding timing of the source rows. In this situation a manual review, fixing and shifting of the translated lines may be required. That’s when the rows shift action is handy. You can access it by clicking on the Shift icon () as shown below:

So, for example, if you want to move a batch of 2 lines down in a local segment/block of 10 rows, you would type “2” and “10” in the above input boxes respectively. If you want to shift say line#10, all the way to the end of the file, then you can also clear the “Shift Block Size” field, so that block/segment is the full file.

Re-translate Lines Block

While LLM translation models (e.g. OpenAI, Gemini, etc) are great and normally does great at the translation, they sometime do mix-up or ignore the translation prompts, and thus either don’t translate a blocks of line at all, or translate the line(s) but mix-up the timings. Thus causing a set of lines to be bad, in otherwise a perfect translation. You can either fix these lines manually during review, or auto re-translate such block of lines to see if the translation engine works better this time.

To fix-up or re-translate a lines block, once the translation is finished, click on the “Re-translate Batch” icon in the translated rows as shown below:

Clicking this icon button brings up the following lines batch configuration dialog:

You just enter the number of following lines to re-translate and click “Re-transalte” button to start it. As the translation begins, a progress is diplay and updated translions are auto updated in the Translated panel once it finishes.

Please note that as there is a limit of the re-translation tries, you should only select the number of lines which would benifit from the re-translation. If there are more failures than you can fix manually, please report this back to me and I will see if I can further tweak the main prompt to make it work better in most cases.