This article details my 2-week adventure into converting this animated film from Turkish to English.
First off, I did take the usual routes and Googled it. And, according to Google, there were already a handful of English .SRT (subtitle files) already out for this film.
What surprised me most of all was that NONE of the submitted translations were correct. Or, well, let me correct myself on that. There were no WORKING subtitles out there.
It was puzzling too. I had just downloaded the Turkish subtitles, opened it up in Notepad and they looked like this.
2
00:00:21,593 --> 00:00:24,248
Çàå�™î å, êðå�™åí!
- Ïîáúðçàé!
3
00:00:37,713 --> 00:00:39,928
Äà íå ñè ïàäíàë â äóïêà�™à!
4
00:00:46,713 --> 00:00:49,288
Ïî÷àêàé ìàëêî!
I immediately took the first few lines and sent them to Google Translate, only to have Google Translate not even recognize it at all !
Puzzling. Curious. There had to be something going on here. Then I finally realized that in order to get the extended character set, it took 2 more more standard notepad characters in order to create it.
Whoever (and it was many people), they all uploaded the same unusable subtitles.
This got to be ludicrous when new subtitles for this movie appeared that even though were in languages that would translate by Google, turned out to be the subtitles for the movie, "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" with Jack Nicholson.
Idiots. So NOBODY anywhere on the planet had any language of subtitles for this film. Wow. It was up to me ...
So jump ahead a week of trying to figure this out. Finally I go to one Turkish website which visually showed what the subtitles look like. And then it hit me. The only program that will properly display the subtitles is an internet browser, NOT notepad, and NOT wordpad. The internet browser.
And the only one that displayed the Turkish text 100% correctly was Opera. Not Firefox, not Internet Explorer, and not Google Chrome.
So now I had the subtitles saved in its language, and that could then be properly translated to English. It would just be a simple matter to copy it and paste it directly in Google Translate, right ?
But no, Google Translate said they want MONEY if they are translating more than 5,000 words to another language. And yes, this .SRT was well over 5,000 words.
So then I frantically went about to try other Turkish to English websites and they all said the same cursed thing. They ALL wanted money to translate something so large. D****t !
So now I'm missing a day of sleep at least, scratching my head trying to figure out what to do. Well, since I actually had a true Turkish copy of the subtitles, I thought what would happen if I put them in the program I use called "Subtitle Edit" ?
Now I normally only use this program to OCR convert hardcoded subtitles from true DVDs to .SRTs or to synchronize those .SRTs posted by others but misaligned to the videos I had.
Well lo and behold one of the options in Subtitle Edit was to translate SRTs to any language. Now before this, I was messing with some Opera and Firefox plugins that claimed to translate entire webpages to English.
Thus the reason I made the post earlier with the Turkish subtitles, so I would indeed have a webpage to translate.
Unfortunately every single one of them went to Google Translate to get their results. And every single time, Google Translate held out their hand and said pay me for more than 5,000 words - or no dice.
I was beginning to believe quite strongly that even though "Subtitle Edit" had an option for translating subtitles to other languages that it, too, would make use of Google Translate and fail because it was well over their 5,000 character free translation limit.
But I had to find out for certain ... This was the turning point.
So, I fed in the straight Turkish subtitles directly from my local 16-bit SRT file. Clicked translate, and did see, that yes, the program did go to Google Translate to translate my Turkish subtitles but better and better it did it one line at a time !
So after a few hours it would indeed translate ALL the Turkish subtitles to English !
And yes, it did ! I saved off the conversion, backed it up, and it looked something like this:
1
00:00:22,919 --> 00:00:25,685
It's busy, stupid!
- Hurry up!
2
00:00:39,710 --> 00:00:42,018
Do not fall into the hole!
3
00:00:49,085 --> 00:00:51,768
Wait a minute!
So there you have it ! All neatly converted to English, and I =WILL= remember in the future that "Subtitle Edit" can indeed translate subtitles, and one line at a time, so there is no limit.
But they HAVE to be in the correct format. The ones listed above this are what Notepad converts a paste of them too where the top 9th through 16th bit of data were NOT recorded by anyone who submitted them - and the true Turkish text is lost when saved and instead converted to nothing Google Translate would ever touch; that 8-bit mess.
And the guys posting their translations didn't even notice their subtitles were wrong ?? Wow.
*SIGH* But I'm happy now. I have the Turkish animation film and English subtitles converted and TONIGHT I'm going to view both of them on the big screen. :)
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