Synchronizing Translated Movie Subtitles

This paper addresses the problem of synchronizing movie subtitles, which is necessary to improve alignment quality when building a parallel corpus out of translated subtitles. In particular, synchronization is done on the basis of aligned anchor points. Previous studies have shown that cognate filters are useful for the identification of such points. However, this restricts the approach to related languages with similar alphabets. Here, we propose a dictionary-based approach using automatic word alignment. We can show an improvement in alignment quality even for related languages compared to the cognate-based approach.