DGT-OmegaT : new DEV+BETA releases published

Recently I was involved in a training about (non-professional) translation of subtitles. I was a little bit surprised that the trainer used simple editors, without any notion of translation memories, despite the fact that the text he was translating contained lot of repetitions. So, I did the proposal to show him how to do the same with OmegaT.

When I tried myself, I saw that OmegaT correctly opened the SRT file and created a translation, but there was still one task done during the training impossible to do with OmegaT: change the timestamps.

Usually the subtitles appear at same time in all languages but it may happen, in particular if the translation is significantly longer than the original, that you want to have them a little bit more time.

I later tried with other CAT tools and realized that the problem is exactly the same. For sure these tools are not designed specifically for SRT, but since there is a support for this format and people using CAT tool may want to translate subtitles, the support should be better.

In new releases 3.6-BETA-1.2 and 3.7-DEV-1.2, I propose the following way: original timestamp appears in the "Comments" pane of DGT-OmegaT, as it is already usual for various properties in other formats. If you copy the timestamp to the "Notes" part and change it, then the filter will use the contents of the note when generating the target file.

This solution is far from being perfect but this is the solution which has the least impact (for the code as well as from a functional point of view). Maybe I will propose something more specific in the future. If in the meantime you see other file formats which contain such modifiable properties (i.e. parts which are not part of the text to translate but may differ from source to target) this may help me to think about a generic solution.

Warning: when a translation is registered as "default", the note is shared by all instances. For that reason, exportation of the timestamp will be unactivated in this case because it cannot be identical in all entries. In any case we strongly advice to inactivate "auto-propagation of translations" if you want to use this feature.

Note: this feature is based on a extension in core of the code, the same as used for exporting note from OmegaT to SDLXLIFF. For that reason it is not possible to have it in a plugin for OmegaT such as the Stax filters plugin.