Notepad showing gibberish for Japanese SRT file

biyakuga · Feb 9, 2024

When I am trying to open an srt file that contain Japanese translation I see gibberish text (unknown symbol instead the text)

Things I already tried:
1. I Installed Japanese language package

2. I edited the settings like this and I restarted my pc:

3. I tried to save the notepad file as UTF-8 instead of ANSI

If I open the srt file with Notepad++ I see it perfectly fine therefore, the only way I was able to solve it was by open the srt file with Notepad++ then copy the content to new Notepad file and save it as UTF-8.

I am trying to understand why this happening and how can I solve it so I will not need to do this trick over and over again for each movie.

I attached the srt file to the discussion

LesFerch · Feb 9, 2024

That's a Shift-JIS file.

jimbo45 · Feb 10, 2024

biyakuga said:
When I am trying to open an srt file that contain Japanese translation I see gibberish text (unknown symbol instead the text)

Things I already tried:
1. I Installed Japanese language package

2. I edited the settings like this and I restarted my pc:
View attachment 86622

3. I tried to save the notepad file as UTF-8 instead of ANSI

If I open the srt file with Notepad++ I see it perfectly fine therefore, the only way I was able to solve it was by open the srt file with Notepad++ then copy the content to new Notepad file and save it as UTF-8.

I am trying to understand why this happening and how can I solve it so I will not need to do this trick over and over again for each movie.

I attached the srt file to the discussion

Hi there

@biyakuga

In the settings -->Add optional features--->

post your original subtitle film the.srt - before translation and I'll see what it looks like -- although I don't understand japanese I willknow when I've got invalid or garbled characters or symbolds

Note also there's a load of excellent subtitle translation sites - Free and translates almost any language to any other for .sub and .srt subtitles. Translation is pretty good though -- A.I has improved machine translation so much these days that it's almost at PRO level. Saves a load of manual translation.

E.g (these places usually use google translate as their main engine --it's pretty good these days).

Translate subtitles online and FREE!

Translate your SRT subtitle files into a rich variety of languages and merge them into one, instantly, online and for free!

translate-subtitles.com

quite a few other ones around too. Often also if the program / film doesn't have subtitles - there's often subtitles on opensubtitles.org in English.Download that and then do the translate.

cheers
jimbo

LesFerch · Feb 10, 2024

jimbo45 said:
In the settings -->Add optional features--->

It's not a font issue. It's a file format issue. The posted file is in Shift JIS format.

biyakuga · Feb 11, 2024

LesFerch said:
The Shift-JIS-To-UTF-8 converter should now download without any false-positive detection from Windows Defender as long as you have definitions 1.403.3529.0 or higher.

It happen in other languages too such as Spanish/Chinese/Arabic etc.

Maybe you have more permeant solution?

biyakuga · Feb 11, 2024

LesFerch said:
Post examples.

Here I attached Arabic subtitle like with the Japanese I can not see the text only squares with questions mark If I open the srt file with Notepad++ I see it perfectly fine the problem only presented with Notepad.

LesFerch · Feb 11, 2024

Try this:

ConvertToUTF8

Convert text files to UTF-8 with encoding auto-detection

lesferch.github.io

biyakuga · Feb 12, 2024

LesFerch said:
Try this:

ConvertToUTF8

Convert text files to UTF-8 with encoding auto-detection

lesferch.github.io

Yes it fixed the problem but I am trying to avoiding using tools like I said in my post I can do the same with Notepad++
I would like to know how to fix Notepad to display text right

LesFerch · Feb 12, 2024

biyakuga said:
Yes it fixed the problem but I am trying to avoiding using tools like I said in my post I can do the same with Notepad++
I would like to know how to fix Notepad to display text right

Notepad is not broken. There is nothing to "fix". What you're asking for is to extend the capabilities of Notepad. That cannot be done.

The files you provided are encoded in formats that Notepad does not support. The Japanese one is encoded as Shift JIS and the Arabic one is encoded as code page 1256. The only encoding schemes that Notepad supports are ANSI, UTF-8, UTF-8 BOM, UTF-16 LE, UTF-16 BE.

Notepad++ supports a very long list of encoding schemes and it auto-detects the encoding. That's not a simple thing to do. Encodings, such as Shift JIS and code page 1256, do not have any signature or BOM (byte order mark). To determine the encoding, the file has to be read and statistically analyzed to determine the most likely encoding. Notepad++ does that and so does the tool I provided (using a free encoding detection library DLL).

In summary, the best you can do is convert those files to UTF-8 so that they can be used with Notepad or any other software that supports UTF-8 (which is almost everything).

biyakuga · Feb 12, 2024

LesFerch said:
Notepad is not broken. There is nothing to "fix". What you're asking for is to extend the capabilities of Notepad. That cannot be done.

The files you provided are encoded in formats that Notepad does not support. The Japanese one is encoded as Shift JIS and the Arabic one is encoded as code page 1256. The only encoding schemes that Notepad supports are ANSI, UTF-8, UTF-8 BOM, UTF-16 LE, UTF-16 BE.

Notepad++ supports a very long list of encoding schemes and it auto-detects the encoding. That's not a simple thing to do. Encodings, such as Shift JIS and code page 1256, do not have any signature or BOM (byte order mark). To determine the encoding, the file has to be read and statistically analyzed to determine the most likely encoding. Notepad++ does that and so does the tool I provided (using a free encoding detection library DLL).

In summary, the best you can do is convert those files to UTF-8 so that they can be used with Notepad or any other software that supports UTF-8 (which is almost everything).

I see thank you so much for the detail explanation.

One more thing please I would like to know why Save As in Notepad to UTF-8 does not work?
If for example, I take the Japanese subtitle and try to save it from Notepad as UTF-8 like I saw in some solutions, would not work here and the new UTF-8 format file still shows the subtitles as [?]

LesFerch · Feb 12, 2024

biyakuga said:
I see thank you so much for the detail explanation.

One more thing please I would like to know why Save As in Notepad to UTF-8 does not work?
If for example, I take the Japanese subtitle and try to save it from Notepad as UTF-8 like I saw in some solutions, would not work here and the new UTF-8 format file still shows the subtitles as [?]

Notepad cannot decode those files, so it cannot convert them correctly to UTF-8. If you started with a UTF-16 Japanese file, for example, Notepad could convert that to UTF-8. But when you start with a Shift JIS file, Notepad decodes it as ANSI resulting in the wrong characters. That's not a bug. It's a limitation. To correctly decode Shift JIS, code page 1256, etc. requires the app to have an encode/decode table for that format and either ask the user to select the correct format or use an analysis algorithm to detect the encoding. Only Microsoft could, in theory, add such capabilities to Notepad.

If you could provide a link to the "solutions" that you saw, I can take a look and see if there is anything more to it.

MWonder · Aug 15, 2025

I'm not sure I follow any of the suggestions presented here, nothing seems to be straight-forward from the subtitle file in gibberish to the output solution in proper Japanese.

This is what I did:

1) Open the file in Notepad++, it opens and displays as giberish
2) Go to Encoding, Character Sets, Japanese, and select Shift-JIS, this changes the gibberish to proper Japanese
3) From this point, I must have missed something obvious but I can't save the file and have it open in Notepad displaying proper Japanese, maybe someone can help here?
4) Instead I copy all text from Notepad++ already showing in proper Japanese and paste it into a new Notepad window, it should display properly
5) In Notepad, save as with an SRT extention, and encoding, UTF-8.

Now this SRT should display properly in the video player

LesFerch · Aug 15, 2025

You could use this:

ConvertToUTF8

Convert text files to UTF-8 with encoding auto-detection

lesferch.github.io

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