As a content producer or distributor, you may want to create subtitles in other languages as part of the localisation process. Doing so you massively increase the reach and accessibility of your content, making it available to audiences that do not speak the original language. Using LImecraft, you can create as many translated versions as possible in no time.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Why Considering Machine Translation?
- Translated Subtitles Using a Translated Transcript
- Translating Subtitles Starting from Existing Subtitles
- Translated Subtitles using Manual Translation
- When starting from the audio, you can either translate the original transcription using built-in machine translation services and create subtitles from the translated transcript,
- you can import an existing Master Subtitle Template in a wide range of formats (including but not restricted to SRT, EBU STL, TTML, SCC, PAC, etc), and create derived translated versions in which case you can impose the same timing between the original and the translated versions, or
- you can manually translate subtitles using the subtitle editor.
Why Considering Machine Translation?
Machine Translation has the potential of massively saving time during localisation.
On the flip side, machine translation may be prone to errors - depending on the type of content and quality of the source, but in either case the result of using machine translation gives you a perfect timing template as a starting point.
Translated Subtitles Using a Translated Transcript
In case you don't have a subtitle template or script, you may want to start from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). As described in this article, ASR will give you a verbatim representation of the words with proper timing.
As soon as the transcription in the original language is delivered, you can add another language as illustrated below. The result will be a translated version of the transcription with retrofitted timing, which is essential to created translated subtitles (see below).
Note: it is important to initially transcribe the audio in the original language before using the translation function. It is not possible to transcribe and translate in a single process.
Next, activate the subtitle editor and select the first option 'Take text from the (target language) transcript and generate timing via spotting rules.
You can find all the versions of the subtitles in the language dropdown list of the Subtitle Editor.
Translating Subtitles Starting from Existing Subtitles
Alternatively, you can start from existing subtitles, newly created same-language subtitles or import pre-existing subtitles, and add a language as illustrated below. In this case, there is no need to use automatic speech recognition in the background.
To do so, from the existing subtitles in the subtitle editor, use the dropdown menu above the subtitles and use "+ Add a new language" as illustrated below.
The subtitle app will display a new overlay where you start typing the destination language. The original subtitles are still available, they are not displayed in here. As soon as you start typing 'fr...' because you're looking for 'French' an auto-suggest function comes to help.
Now pick the desired language and hit "AUTO TRANSLATE".
The result of the process is a second version or the subtitles, displayed side by side with the original, and using exactly the same timing template.
In case you then want to break the timing link between the original and translated versions, use the drop down and hit "Break link with source subtitle". This will allow you to manipulate the timing of the translated version independently from the source timing.
Translated Subtitles using Manual Translation
To start creating your translated subtitles from scratch ('manual subtitling'), navigate to the Subtitle Editor, click on 'Add a new language', and use the option "Manually translate to Language" to start from the existing timing template, or "Start Writing from Scratch".
With the option of taking the timing from the previous subtitles, two subtitle templates open side by side, giving you the option to translate and compare with the source subtitles.
