That Hello-Online page has a Megaupload link to the orignal Japanese "closed caption" subtitle file for the Mechaike episode.
Did it occur to anyone else to stick it through Google Translate and see what happened, or just me?
It comes out like a very bad "HK sub" and can be a bit of a gibberish-y mess but with a bit of common sense/minor japanese knowedge I'd say it helps you follow the show a bit better than not having any subs at all. I know I picked up stuff I missed first time round. (then again, I'm very bad at japanese)
Steps:
1. Rename it as a .txt file instead of .srt (or save a new copy as a .txt file)
2. Open it in Notepad and have a second empty Notepad window open too.
3. Use Google Translate's "translate a document" and choose the .txt file.
4. You'll notice the translation stops mid way through. Copy and paste the translated bit into your blank Notepad document and delete that bit from the original .txt file. (The lines are numbered, so it's easy to get the right point)
5. Save the original file (which should now start where the translation ended), go back in your browser and translate it again. Repeat step 4.
6. Keep doing this until the whole thing is translated (I think it was 3 times for this file).
7. Save your new translated file as an .srt with the same name as your video file. (use UTF-8 if you need to)
8. Use Find & Replace to change all of the -> into --> and < into a blank space to fix the formatting in your new file. My copy of Notepad froze once when I did this step, but it worked OK using Wordpad. Also change the numbers above the first 10 lines back into numbers instead of words (1 instead of one) to match the original file. and you can use Find & Replace to fix the most obvious mis-translations (idle to idol, idling to Idoling, mileage to smileage, tea oil/oil tea to Mechaike, other names if you know them, etc...).
9. Save it again.
That should work.
There may be some sync/timing issues depending on ad breaks being cut differently in the .srt and video files. Easily fixed in a subbing program though. I was trying to sync it with a saved copy of the youtube version and it wasn't a problem until halfway though the second part. The original mp4 file could be from the same source as the .srt, and you won't need to split & re-sync the file to match the youtube parts anyway.
If nothing else it could be a good starting point if someone wanted to properly fansub the show as some of the translation & most of the timing is already done and you just need to tidy it up, make it more readable, fix the worst bits and translate the on screen captions (as they left those out).
Presumably easier than starting from scratch, anyway.
I just though I'd share it as an idea.
Are any other Idoling!!! related shows subbed in Japanese for the deaf on their original broadcast?