The Google Translator Toolkit makes this easier as it provides an interface to upload documents in the formats doc, txt, rtf, odt or html which get then translated by the same translation engine once they have been uploaded. It is furthermore possible to translate websites or Wikipedia and Knol pages.

The translated document can be shared, saved in the account, printed or edited. It is furthermore possible to add comments and use find and replace to replace text quickly in the uploaded document. One advantage of the Google Translator Toolkit is that previous translations are accessible in a Google Docs like interface from where they can be accessed at anytime.

The Google Translator Toolkit is available for users with a Google account.

This has recently changed with Ted Talks Translations which is a community driven translation project. The TED Open Translation project is home to 1048 translators who translate TED Talks into 42 different languages. The main page contains information about the current state of translations.

The most popular languages are Spanish, German, Italian, Hebrew and Portuguese followed by the rest. It is possible to filter TED Talks by language. Translations are provided as subtitles and transcripts. Each video on the TED website contains a pulldown menu which allows to add subtitles to the video.

The translations are interesting to users who have a hard time understanding spoken English. It makes the talks more accessible and easier to understand. Some talks worth viewing:

Hans Rosling on HIV: New facts and stunning data visuals
Matthew Child: 9 life lessons from rock climbing
David Pogue on cool phone tricks
Bill Gates unplugged

There is also an option to analyze existing subtitles for problems like lines with to many characters, empty lines or overlapping times. But analyzing is not the only automatic option that Submagic offers. There is also a very extensive error fixing feature that can fix more than 20 common problems and errors of subtitles including the correction of ocr errors, removal of line separators or the fixing of quotes. Several fixes contain multiple choices that the user can chose from.

The Edit tab can be used to search subtitles, find and replace text and to insert, add, delete or split them. The final tab in the editing process is the synchronize tab which can be just to finetune the display of the lines in the movie.

All of this would not be helpful if there was not some kind of movie preview feature to test the subtitles. That’s possible in the Play Movie tab which also lists some of the commonly used functions mentioned earlier on in the article. It is for instance possible to insert or delete lines directly or to shift and stretch the lines to synchronize perfectly with the movie.

Another interesting option is the movie converter which can be used to convert movies from NTSC format to PAL and vice verse. The final tab contains general options that define how parameters like font sizes for the subtitles, the default screen format and several others like colors or directories on the computer system.

Submagic is a sophisticated well thought out application to work with subtitles. Beginners might feel a bit overwhelmed by the features and settings but it should not take more than a few minutes to get to know the subtitle editor. Impatient users might try their luck with one of the various subtitle downloaders like subtitle downloader, sub download or subtitle download instead.