Translate subtitles
to Japanese

How it works for Japanese

Upload an English .srt or .vtt file, or a season as a zip. Cues travel to the model in batches of 32 so a sentence that spans two cues is translated as one thought. Every Japanese cue then passes thirteen structural checks; whatever fails goes back with the exact complaint attached, and an editor pass sweeps the whole file for register and idiom. You download the subtitles and a quality report, and the upload is deleted.

What the Japanese profile checks

• Line width is 32 columns, and a kana or kanji is two columns. Counting characters would let a Japanese cue render at double the intended width while every check reported it fine.
• Reading speed is 7 characters per second, because a kana carries about an English word. Each side is judged against its own ceiling; comparing raw rates excused an unreadable Japanese cue because the English was comfortable.
• No spaces, so lines are wrapped between characters with basic kinsoku: a closing mark never starts a line, an opening mark never ends one.
• Hiragana, katakana and kanji are accepted together as one script; demanding any single one flags correct Japanese as untranslated.
• Scored with chrF rather than chrF++: with no spaces the word-level component is a pure penalty worth 4.7 points. The gold set covers 34% of an episode, too thin to publish a baseline.

Sound labels, from the table

Labels for the deaf and hard of hearing are resolved from a fixed Japanesetable before the model sees the text, so they are never invented. Three entries, exactly as the table renders them:

[LAUGHS]

[笑う]

[DOOR CLOSES]

[ドアが閉まる]

[PHONE RINGS]

[電話が鳴る]

Is Japanese measured?

A human reference exists for Japanese but covers only 34% of an episode, which is too thin to publish a number from. The same thirteen structural checks run on every Japanese cue regardless, and the quality report in your download lists what they found.

Price and time

One credit translates about 20,000 characters of dialogue, roughly a 25-minute episode; a feature film is about three. Credits are $1.25 each in packs, the first episode is free, and there is no subscription. An episode takes a few minutes; you get an email when it is ready.

Reading

• How we score a machine translation against a human subtitler