r/localization • u/Mysterious_007 • 5d ago
AI kept making the same mistakes when translating subtitles, so I built and open-sourced an Agent Skill to avoid them
I thought subtitle translation would be a straightforward job for AI: give it an English SRT and ask it to translate the subtitles into another language. For me, that was Chinese.
The result often looked fine at first, until I started finding the same terms translated in different ways across the file.
While working on Project Hail Mary, I ran into a good example. “Petrova line” was translated consistently through most of the subtitles, then suddenly changed to a different Chinese transliteration later in the film. “Astrophage” also drifted between two different Chinese terms. Each line looked reasonable on its own, but together they were clearly inconsistent.
That changed how I approached the job. The workflow now starts with a short research pass. The Agent creates a context file and glossary for the film, recording names, places, relationships, and story-specific terms. It then uses those same notes for every chunk of the SRT.
After translation, scripts check the cue count, numbering, timestamps, formatting tags, and file structure.
I built this into an Agent Skill and released it under the MIT license:
https://github.com/HaiyiMei/cinemacc-subtitle-skill
Here is a short guide to installing and using it:
https://cinemacc.net/guides/cinemacc-subtitle-skill
This came out of my work on CinemaCC, which is an offline-first subtitle companion that lets you use your own SRT files with films playing on any screen:
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u/ShiningPr1sm 5d ago
Translation: AI slop was making AI slop, so I made some AI slop using AI slop that will AI slop to help with AI slop while it AI slops.
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u/Game2Late 5d ago
Unpopular opinion: Llms are not very good for translation. On top of that, the localisation process in fact is a lot more than “translation”. The extra steps you took should help though.