I’m in the middle of learning a new language and trying to expose myself to the language. And this add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-dual-subtitles/), I found this very helpful. But because it had access to YouTube, it will automatically download the subtitle (or the auto-generated one) and translate it. What worries me is where and how it got translated and what it’s doing with my activity. Also, sometimes it just doesn’t work at all.

So are there any add-ons similar to this? That you can customize it how it translates stuff, e.g. via local LLM or via translation service of your choosing. Other suggestions to achieve the same goal are welcomed!

I hope Firefox has more capabilities like Auto Translate Live Caption

  • octochamp@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 hour ago

    For what it’s worth I doubt the add-on is doing any translation or sending the youtube subtitles to any other servers. Youtube auto generates translations for videos in loads of languages and then offers subtitles only in the user’s language, so the add-on will just be accessing those already existing .SRT files off of YouTube’s servers which you can’t normally see and displaying them.

  • donio@lemmy.world
    4·
    10 hours ago

    So, this is a more involved approach and it’s not a Firefox add-on but I thought I’d mention it:

    https://fnordig.de/til/Machine-Translation/bergamot-subtitles.html

    You’d play the YT videos outside the browser using mpv in combination with yt-dlp and an mpv lua script would do the translation locally using the Bergamot engine (which happens to be Mozilla’s translation engine). Could be adapted to use other engines too.

    • Zotora@programming.dev
      1·
      4 hours ago

      You could also locally run it through Whisper from Open AI to create subs and then embed them using ffmpeg.

      I do this for vids in languages i dont speak.