I am finding older movies not having translation subtitles when people are speaking a foreign language, like in the beginning of The Hunt for Red October or Stargate. Watching the movie on the the physical copy of Stargate, when they are speaking Egyptian, English subtitles come up translating what they are saying. On my digital copy, I have to have subtitles on all the time in order to see the translation, which sucks because I don’t need subtitles the rest of the movie, just when they are speaking Egyptian. My theory is that there was some sort of trigger on the physical copy that activates the subtitles at that point that is missing from the digital copy. Is there a way to fix or get around this? Or am I just stuck reading subtitles the entirety of the movies if I want to know what people are saying in the foreign language?
You need to make sure when you rip the film that you grab all English subtitle tracks. Use mediainfo to find the smallest one with least elements and that tends to be the forced/translation track. Some people when initially ripping choose to burn those particular subs and those alone into the video. Others just put them in an MKV container with the full subs and mark them as forced with the flag editor. And others don’t rip them at all.
That said, if for some reason your copy didn’t have such a track, it’s possible that the particular forced/translation subtitles had some special marker or something that the BD disc or DVD read and tended to force on and use only those subs. In fact looking at options for exporting PGS visual image subtitles in subtitle edit there is an option to mark individual lines of subtitles as forced so that’s a thing but I’m not sure any players or software currently supports it as all software I’m aware of tends to just look for whether a track is marked as forced or default and then use it or not depending on user preferences.
If you can’t find good subtitles by themselves you could always acquire ('arr) another copy of the full movie and just grab the subs from that and mux them into your file. Again looking for forced flagged/named subs or else ones with less than half the elements of the other sub files.