VLC Media Player developer VideoLAN announced an upcoming feature that will allow users to receive translated subtitles in real-time through AI.
This is particularly noteworthy for anime fans, as it will allow users who don’t speak Japanese to watch titles which may not have been picked up by western publishers. Similarly, users who don’t trust western localizers will have the option to watch without the “official” subs and instead rely on machine translation.
VLC automatic subtitles generation and translation based on local and open source AI models running on your machine working offline, and supporting numerous languages!
Demo can be found on our #CES2025 booth in Eureka Park. pic.twitter.com/UVmgT6K4ds— VideoLAN (@videolan) January 8, 2025
Most importantly, this feature is intended to run locally, meaning there’s no internet connection required to enable the AI subtitles.
In recent years, anime fans have grown skeptical of the sincerity of localizers. In particular, what’s perceived to be politically motivated intentional changes can border on censorship and obscure the author’s vision.
As a result, fans are increasingly putting their trust in AI translation and so far Japanese publishers have been testing the waters. Popular fantasy manga The Ancient Magus Bride now simulpubs with AI translations, and more series are sure to follow.
AI subtitles will be far from perfect, as they’ll translate words in a vacuum and generally ignore prior relevant context. But we imagine fans will consider the trade-off to support Japanese creators directly without western publishers to be worth it.
