Space Dandy (not Da Nde) is an anime about a dandy guy in space.

Upon revisiting one of my favourite shows of all time, I was excited to learn that there were a series bonus episodes I’ve yet to watch. I was less excited to learn that there were no English subtitles for it anywhere on the internet. So I got to work.

Code Explanation

The python script I wrote can be broken up into 5 steps:

1. Extract audio from a video file
2. Transcribe the audio along with timestamps
3. Translate the transcription
4. Convert to subtitle file (.srt)

Most tutorials for machine transcription and translation use online services such as Google’s APIs. I loathe online subscription services. Instead, I found some offline alternatives that can be run locally on my machine:

• whisper for audio transcription using OpenAI’s Whisper
• argostranslate for transcription translation using LibreTranslate

The script can also be easily adapted to create translated subtitles between any languages supported by Whisper and LibreTranslate, not just Japanese to English.

Below is a scene from one of the main episodes (which has official subtitles to compare to). When I ran the program on one of the bonus episodes, it became unwatchable. Unfortunately, Space Dandy is a sci-fi show with a lot of fictional names so the resulting translated subtitles were especially terrible. However, for other genres of anime, the results might be more tolerable.

Original Subtitles	Generated Subtitles