A translation exploration

  A translation exploration Being a speaker of more than one language—English, Serbo-Croatian, and beginner-level Italian—some months ago I gained an interest in video translation and subtitling. I discovered many online apps that aid with this; with a plethora of online AI tools and a slightly lighter wallet, you can quickly find yourself with a subtitled video in the language of your choice. You may just have to make a few corrections to capture local idioms that get lost in translation. Given that I simply wanted to spit out some subtitles without paying to call a third-party LLM or as above paying to use a web application, I turned to Hugging Face’s open-source models. Soon enough, I had a script running locally that output my subtitles in .srt format. I downloaded Kdenlive, an open-source video editor available for my Ubuntu machine, and overlaid the subtitles. Voilà! I had my first subtitled video, allowing me to share Serbo-Croatian videos with my wife (who doesn’t speak the...