Subtitles and Translations for over 100 languages

All about language programs, courses, websites and other learning resources
Fay Lora
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Sep 02, 2021 9:30 am
Languages: Native language: Urdu and English

Subtitles and Translations for over 100 languages

Postby Fay Lora » Tue Sep 07, 2021 7:06 am

I know how we use standard learning apps to learn a foreign language but when you learn a new language, it’s important to get a lot of exposure to it. One of the best ways to do this is by watching movies and TV shows in your target language. In general, it’s better for you to watch foreign-language videos with subtitles, rather than without them.

You can learn languages by reading books or taking classes but this doesn’t give you much exposure to the language. This means that your progress will be slow and frustrating since you won’t be able to use what you learned in real life situations very quickly.
Watching foreign-language TV shows with subtitles allows you to get a lot of exposure to the target language without having to spend too much time studying it on your own. It gives me more confidence when I speak because I know that I have already seen how different words are used in context.
Last edited by Fay Lora on Wed Sep 08, 2021 3:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
0 x

mcthulhu
Orange Belt
Posts: 228
Joined: Sun Feb 26, 2017 4:01 pm
Languages: English (native); strong reading skills - Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Farsi; fair reading skills - Polish, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Portuguese; beginner/rusty - Swedish, Norwegian, Danish
x 590

Re: Subtitles and Translations for over 100 languages

Postby mcthulhu » Tue Sep 07, 2021 3:17 pm

Reading books doesn't give you much exposure to the language?
4 x

User avatar
Gordafarin2
Orange Belt
Posts: 161
Joined: Wed Aug 22, 2018 10:53 am
Languages: English (N)
Current focus: Mandarin (A2), Italian (A2)
Maintaining: Persian (B2), Esperanto (B2), Spanish (rusty B1-2)
Dabbled: ASL, French
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17156
x 557
Contact:

Re: Subtitles and Translations for over 100 languages

Postby Gordafarin2 » Tue Sep 07, 2021 3:37 pm

"Over 100 languages" so long as you count 20 varieties of Spanish as different languages :lol: And 15 of Arabic, and while those have a better argument for being considered as separate, I can't imagine the Arabic spoken in Palestine and Arabic spoken in Israel are that different?

I use the Youtube auto-captions if no real captions are available, they are better than nothing but it varies by the topic and audio quality. I get the sense that you're affiliated with this service, Fay Lora, so how about giving us a head-to-head demonstration of Youtube vs SubtitleBee?
5 x
Persian... 10 novels: 4 / 10

Mandarin...
4000 words: 4000 / 4000 / 2000 characters: 1640 / 2000

she/her

Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: Subtitles and Translations for over 100 languages

Postby Cavesa » Wed Sep 08, 2021 12:02 pm

While the general idea "tv series are great for learning" is certainly correct and I agree with that, I think there are a lot of opinions wrongly presented as facts. Sometimes, it is a good idea to read a bit what has already been discussed on the forum (a million times), before posting. I am actually not sure, whether OP is really a learner or is here to promote the subtitle website (is it their website?). For the purpose of the answer, I'll assume they are a normal person and not a marketing employee.

Fay Lora wrote:I know how we use standard learning apps to learn a foreign language

Then you clearly haven't been paying attention, this is not a forum of lazy morons just playing with an app. Even the app users around here use them together with other tools (including tv series), many people learn totally without apps.

In general, it’s better for you to watch foreign-language videos with subtitles, rather than without them.

Nope. This would be a good statement, had you started with "I believe it's better..."

But no, neither option is in general better. It depends mainly on the level of the learner and also their goals (for example: a learner aspiring to the C levels and job abroad needs to watch without subtitles, because the people they'll be meeting all the time in real life won't be subtitled either).

You can learn languages by reading books or taking classes but this doesn’t give you much exposure to the language. This means that your progress will be slow and frustrating since you won’t be able to use what you learned in real life situations very quickly.

It's nice that you remembers there are were also other tools then just apps. :-D But it is so funny that you claim books to not give much exposure. Classes have many issues, but it is not true that you must fail. They are a very slow and inefficient way to learn, but you can still succeed and many people use the stuff in real life. However, you cannot just draw a conclusion that everything that is not tv series will be slow and frustrating, because it is not true. If you get very serious one on one classes for 3-8 hours a day, you definitely won't progress slowly ;-)

is an excellent auto subtitles generator that allows users like me generate high quality subtitle files for all kinds of videos on YouTube or my own uploads! It also has subtitles and translations for over 100 different languages ​​so everyone can find something they like.


This is what you should have been talking about much more. Instead of preaching "tv series are good" to the already convinced, spitting nonsense about other tools, and so on. But you don't give us any information. How does it generate subtitles? What is the source? Does it rely on machine translation, or is it a subtitle making service with real people? Is it a database of tv series subtitles, or a service creating new ones? You tell us nothing useful here.

It has a free trial so others can try it out but I have found the paid description more useful as well.

Too bad you don't bother to describe the free vs paid functions.

And one quote from your only other post on the forum (which is closely tied to this topic, which futher supports the "you're the Subtitlebee's marketing person":
With subtitles on a video one can observe regional tones, slang words used in everyday speech by native speakers which you might not learn from merely reading alone if that's what you're into.


Oh, really? Most subtitles are not exact, they are not transcriptions. That lowers their value and actually makes learning a bit more complicated. If you meant that all this stuff (tones, slang, everyday speech) is a huge advantage of tv series, then I'd agree with such a statement, but that has nothing to do with the subtitles. This value will be there whether or not you have subtitles.
5 x

User avatar
chove
Green Belt
Posts: 374
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 10:42 pm
Location: Scotland
Languages: English (N), Spanish (intermediate), German (intermediate), Polish (some).
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9355
x 920

Re: Subtitles and Translations for over 100 languages

Postby chove » Wed Sep 08, 2021 3:38 pm

mcthulhu wrote:Reading books doesn't give you much exposure to the language?


Do they mean "using textbooks" maybe?
0 x

Fay Lora
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Sep 02, 2021 9:30 am
Languages: Native language: Urdu and English

Re: Subtitles and Translations for over 100 languages

Postby Fay Lora » Wed Sep 08, 2021 3:59 pm

It seems my post has offended a lot of people and I do sincerely apologise for the way it seems to have come across.

I did not mean to demean or belittle any language learning methods out there, neither anyone's efforts nor any resources they may use. Reading books has and will always be a conventional method of learning, and we've all benefitted from that. But, when I stated the word 'exposure', I only meant adding subtitles to a form of entertainment hobby could also serve as a learning method and not just a leisure activity. I did not mean to 'PREACH' or forcefully convince anyone of my view.

Again, I am sorry for the way the whole post may have seemed to discredit anyone's efforts or learning methods. I could have definitely written it better and gone through some of the previous posts to avoid all of the above.

I am not sure if deleting the original post will delete my reply but I'll delete the SubtitleBee stuff for now (waiting for the mode to approve that edit) and will then take down this whole post tomorrow.
0 x

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: Subtitles and Translations for over 100 languages

Postby Iversen » Wed Sep 08, 2021 7:08 pm

It will create more confusion if you remove the first post in the thread, but the reference to the bee-thing did look like an attempt to advertise a site in which you might have some vested interest. And if that site really counts dialects as languages then I'm sceptical about its value.

As for apps I haven't used them - I have some homepages which I use, including Youtube which does offer subtitles, but I never use them - and I only use subtitles on TV if I want to turn down the sound. On the other hand I do recommend the use of bilingual texts for intensive text studies, and I use texts rather than videos because I find it easier to slow down with written texts. I accept that you may get some help from subtitles to understand videos and TV programs, but I fear that you forget to listen while you read them.

And (depending on what you choose to read) you can also find colloquial language in written texts.
2 x

Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: Subtitles and Translations for over 100 languages

Postby Cavesa » Thu Sep 09, 2021 10:09 am

Fay Lora wrote:It seems my post has offended a lot of people and I do sincerely apologise for the way it seems to have come across.

I did not mean to demean or belittle any language learning methods out there, neither anyone's efforts nor any resources they may use. Reading books has and will always be a conventional method of learning, and we've all benefitted from that. But, when I stated the word 'exposure', I only meant adding subtitles to a form of entertainment hobby could also serve as a learning method and not just a leisure activity. I did not mean to 'PREACH' or forcefully convince anyone of my view.

Again, I am sorry for the way the whole post may have seemed to discredit anyone's efforts or learning methods. I could have definitely written it better and gone through some of the previous posts to avoid all of the above.

I am not sure if deleting the original post will delete my reply but I'll delete the SubtitleBee stuff for now (waiting for the mode to approve that edit) and will then take down this whole post tomorrow.


It's not about being offended, that's not what is happening here. Your post just looked really more like a piece of bad marketing than anything else, no offense meant.

Also, the word "preach" was not used in the sense of anything forceful, nobody is accusing you of that, but as a part of a normal figure of speech "to preach to the convinced". Vast majority of people around here already agrees about the value of tv series in a foreign language (even those, who don't really watch them, as they have different goals), which you'd know, had you read a bit of the forum before posting.

It is also not true that reading books has always been a conventional method. Back when I was a teen, I was actually discouraged by the conventional teachers from actually reading books in the target language as an intermediate learner. And even these days, many discourage the students for various reasons, mostly prejudices (they think books=only difficult high literature, they have prejudices against the lower genres, prejudices against extensive reading and favouring only intensive, and so on). Yes, every reader has benefited from reading in a foreign language. But it is simply not true, that it's one of the conventional and default methods. Not even people doing a language degree necessarily read a lot of books in the language, they were surprised I did.

We keep misunderstanding each other, "exposure" also means watching the tv series in the TL, whether or not you use subtitles. It is not just a leisure activity, especially at the intermediate level. Or did you mean adding target language subtitles to tv series in your native language? If that is so, then I understand why you consider that to be an added new source. But I must say that it is not a good way. It might be better than nothing, but it depends heavily on the quality of the subtitles, and it trains only your reading and not listening. It is not that useful. But you might like using double subtitles, with a tool like "Learning Languages with Netflix", where you get the TL audio, TL subtitles, L1 subtitles if needed, easy dictionary access with one click on a word that also gets saved.

And I don't know, why you totally omit the issue that you promote the subtitlebee website, but don't actually add any useful info about it. There are already tons of subtitle sources online, what is special about this one? My questions (machine or human translation, a database of existing stuff or a service creating new, etc) stay unanswered.

I'd say the thread would be more valuable with info about the Subtitlebee for future reference, than just with a deleted post
2 x


Return to “Language Programs and Resources”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests