OpenSubtitles forum

Hi, brand new to the forum and I realized recently that as a hearing impaired person I've been benefiting from others' hard word for years by using uploaded subtitle files and that I've never given anything back. So, in searching for a useful niche I found that there exist very few available subtitle files that include (specific language) subtitles for all languages in those films that have spoken dialogue in more than one language. That is to say, for example, the film "Dark Blue World" about expatriate Czech (and other nationalities) pilots who flew for the Royal Air Force during WWII. This film has spoken dialogue in English, Czech, French, and Polish, and while one can easily find, say, English subtitles for any one given language spoken in the film (e.g. English to English, or French to English, or Czech to English, etc.) the remaining dialogue remains un-subtitled. This is fine for those with normal hearing who just need subtitles for the languages they don't understand but for the hard of hearing it doesn't get the job done; we need all dialogue subtitled, regardless of the language.

So, this is my project. Is there a way, using Jubler or other software, to combine already available subtitle files for a given film to produce one file that will display (e.g. English) subtitles for all dialogue in a multi-language film? Doing this manually is tedious in the extreme and any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I don't quite get your meaning.
First of all, there are not many films with mixed languages. Well, maybe there are but they are still not very frequent. The Red Violin (Le violon rouge) is a good example of it. In most of the films you have just some phrases. If they are not very meaningful the translator could just skip them.

Even if there were many mixed language subtitles OS doesn't support them. There is only one language for each subtitle. There is an exception to this rule, namely the Chinese-English subtitles which seem more common but in this case it doesn't mean that the film has mixed languages but that the subtitle has more than one language in it. I think it's a silly thing to do but...

Usually the subtitle maker has a target audience (or a target language). I mean, people who use the subtitle want to get the meaning so usually the subtitle contains just one language, with all the different parts translated to that target language. Then the result is that you (the watcher) get the meaning but could miss some information. I usually write "[Speaking LANGUAGE]" along with the dialog where LANGUAGE is the language used in the dialog (see "A los que aman", Those who love).

I don't know this film but I think the right thing to do would be translate every language to the target language. I think that if that's not so it may be because the translator doesn't understand every language used in the film.

About combining files... I can recommend the use of a good text editor like Emacs. It is still hard work but it could alleviate the problem.

Hector,

You are correct, you don't get my meaning. Thanks anyway.

Yeah. I realized I was missing the point. I guess I have another point of view. As someone interested in linguistics I'd like to have support for mixed language subtitles. I know this is not the common use of subtitles.

So you want to combine different subtitles of different parts of the film, all in the same language into one subtitle. As I said, since SRT format is basically text you can do it treating them as text, cutting and pasting. So a good text editor would do. With a simple text editor you can't handle timings properly but in this case you just have to merge the files so you wouldn't have to fiddle with them. Just insert each file in the right place.

Subtitle Edit can do this easily - provided that all the individual subtitle files have correct timings matching that one specific video file. If not, you should do that BEFORE merging the files.
Finish with renumbering to give all lines correct and subsequent numbers (Tools > Renumber...)