Why timestamps must stay untouched

A subtitle timestamp does two jobs: it tells a video player when a cue appears and when it disappears. If a translation shifts those times, captions drift out of sync with the audio and become worse than useless.

Most tools that "translate" a subtitle file by rewriting it can change formatting along the way. The safest workflow is the one that touches only the text between timestamps.

  • Cues keep their original start and end times
  • Sequence numbering stays 1, 2, 3
  • Line breaks and encoding remain as authored

What a timestamp-preserving translation keeps

A well-built SRT translator treats the timing block as fixed data. It reads the file, extracts each cue, translates the text and writes the result back into the same cue with the same timestamp.

Cue structure

Each cue in an SRT file has three parts: a sequence number, a timestamp line such as 00:01:23,456 --> 00:01:26,789 and one or more text lines. Only the text lines should change during translation.

How Polyglot Tool keeps SRT timestamps

Polyglot Tool parses your SRT, validates it, translates each cue in the browser and writes the result back into the original structure. The numbering and the timestamp lines are not regenerated from scratch; they are preserved from the file you upload.

Because processing happens in your browser, you do not need to upload the subtitle content to a server to keep the timestamps safe.

  • One SRT file per job
  • Automatic source detection or manual selection
  • Several target languages in a single run
  • Individual or ZIP downloads

How to check the output for yourself

After translating, open the downloaded file in any subtitle editor and compare the timestamp lines with the original. They should match line for line; only the text below each timestamp should differ.

If you automate quality checks, diff the two files: every line that contains --> should be identical.

An SRT cue before translation

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,000
Hello and welcome to this video.

2
00:00:04,500 --> 00:00:07,000
Today we explain how timestamps stay intact.