Subtitles: SRT and WebVTT

What you see

One row per subtitle. Its text is the source, and you write the translation beside it, so every row starts Empty. A subtitle on two lines stays on two lines. Counters, timecodes and cue settings (position, alignment, region) are not part of the text you edit, and neither are the WebVTT header and its NOTE, STYLE and REGION blocks; they stay in the file as they are. A subtitle with no text is not a row.

12
00:01:04,500 --> 00:01:07,250
<i>I told you not to come back.</i>
Not tonight.

In a WebVTT file, a cue's identifier is shown as its key in the Details panel, and a NOTE right above a cue as a note on it. The Details panel also gives the exact time the subtitle is on screen.

WEBVTT
Language: en

NOTE The speaker is off screen.

intro
00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:04.000 align:start position:10%
<v Roger>We are in New York City

Line length and reading speed

Under each translation the grid shows the characters on every line, the reading speed in characters per second, and how long the subtitle is on screen. Before you translate a subtitle, it shows the time on screen alone: that is the time the translation has to fit in. A number turns red once it passes its limit.

QA checks each translated subtitle against the same three limits: 42 characters per line, 2 lines, and 17 characters per second, by default. Change them under Subtitle limits in the QA panel, or leave a field empty to switch that limit off. Characters are counted as they appear on screen, spaces and punctuation included, formatting tags and line breaks not. Each limit is its own issue, so you can ignore the reading speed of one fast speaker and still have the line lengths checked.

Only your subtitles change

The export is not a rewrite. It starts from the file you opened and replaces only the text of the subtitles you translated. Counters, timecodes, cue settings, blank lines, line endings and a byte order mark are the original file's. Open a file, change nothing, export it, and the two files are identical byte for byte; the round trip on How it works shows it on a file of yours.

12
00:01:04,500 --> 00:01:07,250
<i>Ich hab dir gesagt, komm nicht zurück.</i>
Nicht heute Nacht.

A subtitle you leave untranslated keeps its original text, so a half-translated file still has every subtitle in it. New lines take the line ending of the subtitle they are in. A blank line inside a translation is left out, because a blank line ends a subtitle and the rest would be cut off. In a WebVTT file, &, < and > in your text are written as &, < and >, as the format requires.

Formatting and position codes

Italics, bold, underline and font colours in an SRT, and position codes such as {\an8} (top of the screen), appear as tags: place them in your translation, and they are written back exactly as they were. In a WebVTT file the voice, class, language and ruby spans and karaoke timestamps are tags too. QA reports a tag your translation is missing, as it does in any other file.

Excel and TMX

The Exports menu works on subtitles as on any file: a bilingual Excel workbook with every subtitle, numbered as in the file, for someone to read; a review workbook whose decisions import back into the subtitles; and a TMX memory of the subtitles you confirmed.

Before you start

• The file must be UTF-8 (an SRT may also be UTF-16 with a byte order mark). Many older SRT files are in a Windows code page; one of those is refused with a sentence saying so, rather than opened with the wrong characters. Save it as UTF-8 in your subtitle editor and open it again.
• Subtitle files do not say which language they are in. The source language is read from a WebVTT file's Language line, or from a file name like episode.en.srt. The language you translate into is not in the file at all, so a TMX made from it marks the target language as und (undetermined).
• The exported file keeps the name it arrived with. Rename it for your language, for example from episode.en.srt to episode.de.srt.
• Compare and Multilingual Excel do not take subtitle files: both work on translations stored beside their source, and a subtitle file holds one language.