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I am downloading torrent movies and need to translate subtitles into different languages, but most of the downloads contain no subtitle files (srt. etc), although the movies do have subtitles. Are they embedded in the movie file itself?

I was able to Google Translate one movie download srt. file, but have not been able to find most of the other subtitle files.

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Yes a srt file can be embed to a movie file with softwares like Virtualdubmod. if it's embedded then i am not sure you are able to retrieve that. –  Rahul Gautam Oct 7 '12 at 6:30
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It depends. Some container formats (notably .mkv, but there are others) allow you to embed subtitles as text files/subtitle streams, but that is not a guarantee that one particular video has done so. You try playing the video in VLC media player, you can see embedded subtitle streams under Tools => Codec Information.

The other commonly used method is to write the subtitles into the video stream itself, which is usually an irreversible operation unless you want to manually transcribe them.

Then, once you have verified that the container has a separate subtitle stream, you can extract it. The method is specific to the container format and there are many guides and tools available online for such a purpose; a quick search on Super User itself has revealed guides for OSX here.

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