Barbora Lutovska wrote:
Usually it depends if the burned-in captions are plot-pertinent or not and what is actually being said.
For example when I have an English movie, suddenly there's someone speaking French and the burned-in text is an English translation, then sure, I should translate it (= it's a part of the dialogue, the audience should know what's being said).
If it's burned-in captions/text for example for a date/time/place, I caption it only when it needs translation - for example if the caption says 04.05.2023, I ignore it, but if it says "Thursday 04.05.2023" I include it and translate it to my language.
But only if there's space - someone might be talking and it's more important to include dialogue than what date/day it is.
And I include the translation in the subtitle software between dialogue subtitles.
I mean that's in the case I'm the one creating the subtitles from scratch (= there is no template of the original language). Because today (when you just translate), they often don't want you to change the time-codes and subtitle numbers (= no deleting, no inserting subtitles). There are other people translating to 100+ other languages, so the company needs to later adjust all the subtitles at once.
In that case (=there are burned-in captions missing from the template and they are important for the plot) I message the project manager.
Thank you very much for your useful explanation! They asked me to translate a Word template that is missing some content (that will pop-up on the screen) and to time-code everything from scratch so I'll be quite free to manage that part.