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Show HN: Subasub – Learn Languages with Translated Subtitles
- drakmail 10y agoReally awesome idea! Bookmarked it. PS. Searching could be faster =(
- larion1 10y agoThanks for the encouragement! :) I will definitely think about some tweaks to make it faster. I had to invalidate the cache (new version) like a week ago so the problem might at least partially solve itself. Also I might step over to some kind of document store instead of a transactional db in the future.
- Mahn 10y agoSearch was speedy enough for me, 1 second at worst, no complaints here.
- beyti 10y agomaybe the hn effect here but was really slow for me too, ended with "couldn't connect to server" the first time. Cool idea though. my 2 cents: would be lovely to see a few popular searches or recent searches or at least example words to speed up the understanding of the concept; after selecting the languages.
- larion1 10y agoThanks good idea. I see a lot of people are entering movie titles, so I could add a search by movie feature. Or just make a better UI to make the intent clear (popular searches would definitely help in that). By the way I am in the process of resizing the DB instance, it was not really ready for this kind of traffic. :/ So I hope service will be somewhat better shortly.
- Mahn 10y agoSuperb idea, it makes so much sense to look up foreign words this way that it's suprising we weren't learning languages this way already.
- visarga 10y agoPretty soon there will be even less reason to learn (so many) foreign languages, because automated translation is going to get very good, unless you need it on the street.
- luxpir 10y agoShame some people have such a negative view of learning a foreign/new language. You're not just learning a language, but a whole culture. New ways of thinking, interacting and connecting with the world. Such intense focus on computer-based solutions robs us of genuinely fulfilling life experiences, swapping them out for quick dopamine hits and thousands of completely forgettable 'oh cool' moments.
- visarga 10y agoI personally subscribe to your view, but was thinking outside my perspective. I have learned a couple of foreign languages pretty well and enjoy comparing cultures and ways of thinking.
- larion1 10y agoService is responsive again :) I really didn't expect to get on the frontpage.
- AznHisoka 10y agoWhat's the backend?
- larion1 10y agoThe backend is in perl using the Dancer framework ( https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Dancer/bin/dancer https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Dancer/bin/dancer ). The db is Postgres with Full Text Search. Everything is on AWS.
- anonfunction 10y agoI couldn't think of movie names, would be cool to have a "browse" mode of discovery as well.
- larion1 10y agoYeah, actually it works more as a contextual dictionary now, so you can look up words or expressions and you get dialogues in which these occur (with some movie metadata as an extra). There is no functionality yet to search for dialogues in a given movie. It seems though that there is quiet a demand for such a feature, so I might add it soon. :)
- cachvico 10y agoUpvote/downvote buttons!
- larion1 10y agoGood idea!
- kumarski 10y agoI developed a similar product a few years ago. http://lingomill.appspot.com http://lingomill.appspot.com I would love to connect with you. The product uses subtitles and vice video segments to teach people a language. Dual subtitles are the key.
- anewhnaccount2 10y agoCould you add Finnish?
- larion1 10y agoI would love to, but it might take some time until I get to it. I actually added Portuguese and Russian just recently and I plan to stay with the current 9 languages for a little time to see if there is enough interest in this product (and maybe I can break even in server costs - I don't really have any monetization model atm, I might add a donate button though). But yeah I would love to add new languages :). Same goes for Japanese.
- drakmail 10y agoCould donate several dollars or provide an account on my dedicated server for free
- riffraff 10y agoI could not understand what I was supposed to search while looking at this on mobile, it seems the text below the search is missing. Anyway: neat! Good idea and works quite well. But it does look like the matching text is wrong sometimes, i.e. third example here https://subasub.com/?lang=hu&query=%20juh%C3%A1sz https://subasub.com/?lang=hu&query=%20juh%C3%A1sz The HU sentence is 'Beszéltünk a juhásszal' the corresponding IT sentence is 'Abbiamo parlato con il pastore' but it gets a much longer one. Similarly, example 9 here https://subasub.com/?lang=hu&query=puszi https://subasub.com/?lang=hu&query=puszi has "Adj egy puszit!" ("give a little kiss") on one side, which should match "Dammi un bacio!" but on the other side it matches the previous sentence ("…Vieni qui!" is "…- Gyere ide!"). Maybe a "report error" could be added although I fear it would be hard to support.
- larion1 10y agoFirst example is actually more of an UI issue which I will fix asap. Filtering out or fixing (where it is feasible) the bad quality stuff (alignment-errors like your second example) is very high on my list. Of course it's less trivial to do it right.
- gyvastis 10y agoAwesome idea! Though there could be an option to search by a movie
- executesorder66 10y agoI am really surprised Japanese is not an option. This is awesome by the way.
- sdrothrock 10y agoJapanese subtitles are hard to find for various reasons, one of which is that Japanese DVDs and blurays often come without them.
- DarkLinkXXXX 10y agoWhat about fansubs? The right people could tell you which sub groups are the most trustworthy. Perhaps another option could be incorporating music lyrics, as there are many sites that list Japanese, romaji (romanized Japanese), and English lyrics beside each other that you can scrape. In case you didn't already know, subs.com.ru is a great source of anime fansubs (no video, just the subs). There's also opensubtitles.com, but I'm not sure how to heuristically determine what the quality subtitles are. I can understand if you're hesitant to use unlicensed translations, but I've found that licensed subs hardly compare to a quality fansub group.
- sdrothrock 10y agoThat relies on you wanting to watch things that tend to get fansubs, though. As a mostly-deaf foreigner living in Japan, I tend to watch/want to watch a lot of things that don't get fansubbed, like news, foreign shows/movies, variety shows, cooking shows, and tons of domestic-only movies/shows that don't get much international attention.
- larion1 10y agoWow so many good suggestions. You are really cool :)
- luxpir 10y agoNice work! Translators use this kind of tool every day, known by them as concordance searching, where finding other uses of a term in context can give nuance and new word-choice options. I can see how this can be used in language learning but it really helps to know the multiple uses of any given word, and that assumes prior knowledge. One way to incorporate this prior knowledge could be to add dictionary definitions to the search results. Is there a way to scrape or API the wiktionary? That might be one way to do it on the fly without the impossible task of building a dictionary.
- sayginburak 10y ago"Translators use this kind of tool every day," Can you name a few of them?
- luxpir 10y agoSure, it's actually a feature of the major tools, rather than a tool in itself (in most cases). Look up MemoQ, Trados and the newer EU project Matecat. Dozens more besides, take a look at the Wikipedia page for CAT tools [0]. -- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation
- drakmail 10y agoHave a 504 error (Gateway Timeout) while sending a request for searching something ;-( Please repair it =)