We watch a ton of stupid Hallmark Christmas movies during December, it's our thing. Very few of them are available here and don't have subtitles in our language, english subs do exist.

So, how hard can it be to translate them automatically? Tried a few ready-made tools and they either just plain didn't work or made stupid mistakes due to bad prompting.

I fired up Claude and had an MVP that could 1) rip english subtitles out of a mkv file 2) shove them to OpenAI API for translation in batches within a few hours

v2 took two evenings of me watching TV and bouncing around between Claude+Codex+Crush(GLM-4.6)

1) Get subtitles from original

2) Feed full subtitle file to GPT-4o for first pass analysis. It finds names for people, locations etc and decides a singular translation so they don't vary and gives a general context for the tone/genre of the movie for translation

3) Give gpt-4o-mini the first pass context file and a section of the subtitles in a loop

4) save them as .srt

The results are SO MUCH better than most of the "real" translation we've encountered. I think a bunch of them were done by a zero-shot AI or a human who didn't give a fuck about quality and had to meet a quota.

And none of this would've been done without AI, there's so much crappy boilerplate on top of the few actually interesting bits I would've just tolerated the bad ready-made solutions instead.