Download the subtitles for Chinese movies
We already know that watching Chinese TV and Chinese cartoons is an excellent way to improve your Chinese, likewise, subtitled Chinese movies are also a great way to improve your reading and listening ability. Even though most Chinese movies already come with subtitles, but there are still some instances when subtitles might be missing, or they are in Simplified Chinese and you need Traditional Chinese and vice-versa. Luckily you can download subtitles for almost any movie, and in almost any language, including Chinese.
At Shooter.cn you can find the Chinese subtitles for a huge selection of movies. There are subtitles for both Chinese and English language movies, so if you want to see how some English might translate into Chinese then you can add the Chinese subtitles to your English language movies. Before downloading make sure you check for your desired language （语言）as generally there are versions for Simplified （简）and Traditional（繁） Chinese.
Shooter seems to be one of the best, if not the best, website for Chinese subtitles, but if you know of any other websites for downloading subtitles then please let us know in the comments.
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Dave Flynn
Dave is a designer of websites, learner of Chinese and lover of technology. Originally from the UK , he's been living in Taiwan and learning Mandarin Chinese for the last four years. He founded and runs Chinese Hacks, a blog dedicated to effectively learning Chinese.
14 Comments
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Shooter.cn is undoubtedly the best subtitle-sharing website in China. I have been using it for years.
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Hi,Dave!
Nice to find the post and I’ve always wondered where these english subtitles come from. Are they translated by someone professional or by fans who like these pictures?
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Hi binnle, some of them are by fans, and are ‘fansubs’, and you’ll find most fan subs are for pirate movies or for movies which just don’t have official subs yet.
Other subs are ‘subrips’ which use software to ‘rip’ the subtitles off the DVD movies.
Hope that clears it up, thanks for commenting!
Dave
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i “tried” downloading the subtitles. i went to the website, shooter.cn
however when i try to open the file that i “downloaded”, it doesnt open!! it says something like file extension or something like that. i “downloaded” it so many times and it never opens. help?!
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Hi No,
The files on Shooter are mostly RAR files, which are like Zip files. Make sure you have WinRAR or 7-Zip installed so you can extract the archived subtitle files.
Dave
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Dave – great post. It doesnt seem like shooter.cn has pinyin subtitles? Ideally, I like to be able to look at characters and the pinyin at the same time. Any suggestions on sites that may have the pinyin subtitles for us movies? Thanks.
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Hi James,
I know exactly what you mean and I did do some experimenting with this a while ago. There are some fonts available that will show the Pinyin or Zhuyin in place of, or next to, the Chinese character. So the idea is that you would choose this font to display the subtitles in your movie player.
The problem is that, as a lot of characters have multiple pronunciations, that these fonts often don’t show the correct pronunciation. This is the reason I ended up not writing about them in the end.
There is a font package mentioned on Pinyin Joe called Dynafont that includes the Pinyin:
http://www.pinyinjoe.com/pinyin/pinyin_addins.htm#Fonts_DynaComware
They are called “ruby” fonts from what I can tell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_characters
Let me know how you get on, I’m interested to see if you have better luck than I did!
Dave
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Downloaded a number of Chinese movies subtitles from shooter.cn and it shows some kind of symbols besides the chinese characters. Any one know why? I use VLC media player
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Hi Mike, The problem is likely because the incorrect character encoding is being used to read the subtitles.
You can change the character encoding of the subtitles in the VLC settings. I’m not sure of the exact location (I’m on a Mac now and it looks like the setting location has changed recently anyway). You are looking for the ‘Default Encoding” of the subtitles.
I usually use Traditional Chinese so I choose the “Big 5″ setting. There are a few options for Simplified Chinese so the best thing to do is to try a few until you find the correct one.
Hope this helps!
Dave
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Hey Dave, I’ve just tried downloading subtitles, however it says”文件尚未读取完毕，请稍候点击下载按钮.”– I have no idea what to do. lol. thanks!
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Hi Justin,
You need to wait for the page to completely load first. I’ve seen this error before and I assume there is a script running on the site to make sure everything (read: advertising) has loaded before allowing the download links to be clicked.
Try again, but now wait until the progress bar on your browser has finished loading the page, then click the download link for the subs you want.
Hope that helps!
Dave
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i have had no luck with VLC and chinese (simplified) subtitles from this site. no matter what encoding used, they all come out as garbled text unless i use their really crappy Splayer. Even though i have to litter my computer with yet another media player, it would actually be okay if it wasn’t the biggest piece of crap i ever used, totally distorting playback video quality.
have you had any other luck extracting subtitles from this site and using them with VLC ?
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Hi gg, I know how you feel. I use a mac and gave up with VLC a long time ago in favour of Movist, which allows you to switch encoding in real-time to quickly find the correct one (as opposed to VLC which requires you to close and reopen the movie).
When I have got it working in VLC there seem to be two things which need to be correct – the encoding, and also a font for the particular language, in the image below you can see i’ve not only chosen Traditional Chinese, but also selected a Traditional Chinese font.
If all that fails, something I also try is opening the subtitles file in a text editor, then saving it back out in the desired encoding. I think that sometimes the subtitle files are saved incorrectly so this works now and again.
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Could you please detail the exact procedure to install english subtitles on chinese movies
thank you
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