Putting captions on German Videos.

[Wardo]

Hi, I'd like to translate roughly 49 mins worth of German videos and add English captions to them, the latter is the easy part, I never edited a movie before but I guess there is a myriad of freeware and payware software to get the job done one way or another, the hard part is translating as I don't speak German, I got a grasp of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (latin languages are so easy) and some basic French of course and I try hard to improve my English but I know nothing about German and I don't know anyone who could do this for me either.

So, do you have any suggestions? I see I can:

a) Learn German, do it myself, this would take alot of time and effort though I wouldn't mind speaking German as the more the better, still I don't have time for this right now.

b) Call a private German teacher and ask for the translation, would be cheaper, no problems with copyright, but there's a higher risk of translation errors.

c) Go professional, much more expensive but less risk of any terrible mistakes, is it worth it?

What would YOU do?

[Arcanum]

I AM german, I would translate it myself. ;)

What is it for, by the way?

[solypsist]

write the lines down, pref. in script form, and then post an ad on craigslist for translation for about $25. then you can either meet the person to "interview" or if you feel they're okay, just email them the script and then pay them when it's done. 49 minutes is potentially a lot of dialogue, so you may or may not want to raise the rate.

i needed french subs for one of my videos, which will be screening in paris next year, and 30 seconds of voice turned out to be 2 full pages of script, double typed.

[Wardo]

@Arcanum, how about some free German lessons? Consider it charity!
It's actually for private use, though, I guess it could possibly, in a hypothetical scenario, be distributed for free over the internet, as long as that doesn't violate any German TV copyright laws, of course.

@solypsist: Thanks for the hint, I guess that's the way to go.

I certainly over-estimated the dialogue time, it's definitely less than 49 mins, it's more like 35 or being very optimistic 30.

Oh well, I already thought of everything then, time to go find a translator.