How can I translate my dvd that is in Chinese to English subtitles?

Question

Note I do not speak chinese but I enjoy watching the dramas.

Answer 1

Oh, boy, this one is going to be tough.

Your best bet is locate the DVDs that COME WITH ENGLISH subtitles. Popular ones like Legend of Condor Heroes may have special INTL editions with English subtitles.

If you're talking about Chinese internal production (not HK, as most HK movies have bilingual sutitles) then I'm afraid there's almost no chance of finding the subtitles already made. You can try, but I doubt it.

There are OCR programs available, but none that I recall that will work on DVD subtitles (for English, there is Subrip, but Chinese OCR is much more complicated, and no known programs that I know) thus, there's not much you can do to extract the subtitles and machine-translate that into broken English. You'll just have to translate it line by line. You may as well learn Chinese.

Reading Chinese is quite difficult. Not to mention there are two sets of written Chinese system... The Traditional Chinese, and the Simplified Chinese. Official "Mandarin" Chinese is the dominant spoken language, with Cantonese dialect a distant but significant second place. Not knowing which dramas you may be talking about, it's rather hard to recommend which one to learn. :)