[Tom Hughes]

Hi Jona,
I have had a few subtitling projects, most in English, but also in Arabic, Portuguese, Mandarin, Hindi, Japanese and Turkish. My workflow is as follows:

Applications used: Premiere Pro CS6-CC 2014, Aegisub, Jubler, After Effects CS6-CC

Edit in Premiere

Transcription from final edit (.txt)
Translation (external service) – this is formatted to keep lines at the maximum length, set by styling, and splitting them sensitively (.txt)

This text file is then imported into Aegisub for timing along to final edit (external service if in another language) (Aegisub provides timecode in 1/100 second increments rather than frames which the script below needs to finction correctly)
Saved as .ass file
Opened in Jubler and saved as .ssa file

Open After Effects with your edit in the timeline
Style a text layer the way you want subtitles to look
With your text layer selected, use pt_SSAKaraokeAnimator script to load the .ssa file saved from Jubler
This creates a text layer with all subtitle changes marked as ‘Source Text’ hold keyframes, allowing for easy adjustment

I could place this as a dynamic comp in Premiere and edit both back and forth, but I always leave subtitling to the end.

For Arabic, I had to use the ArabicText script to correctly reverse the characters.
For Hindi, I had to take care with my unicode characters as some were displaying oddly on my English language system. As far as I know, Adobe products cannot handle Hindi characters dependably. I actually had to use Submerge to hardcode my subtitles as it handled Hindi fine.

This worked very well for me, but for you, a similar approach to what the pt_SSAKaraokeAnimator script takes may work well.

If you link an After Effects comp to Premiere, you could set up a text layer and keyframe ‘Source Text’ and change the text as you go along the edit. It seems to fit with your linear style of working, though trying to edit in a different language to your own must be very difficult!

Premiere Pro CC has a closed captioning feature which has very limited styling options. Not really for subtitling, although may be useful for your editing.

It seems there isn’t a simple solution inside Premiere, although in tandem with After Effects you’ve many more options.