The International Cartoon Consumer's Toolkit
A disorganized guide to translating cartoons when you don't speak the language. Works for non-cartoons, too!
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I promised last time in the first post about my IMDB Rabbit Hole system that I'd write on the process of watching international series in languages you don't speak. In the 'olden days', back when I first got into this sort of thing, I usually made no attempt to translate them at all; I spent many an hour searching for and watching probably-illegal streams of international Cartoon Networks and equivalent nation-specific animation channels, chasing elusive dubs of series I knew well. This sort of thing fascinated me, especially when my efforts paid off with interesting observations about the shows I was watching. Did you know that the Russian dub of The Love, the Amazing World of Gumball episode, cuts off in an awkward place before the insinuation of homosexuality in one of the shorts, Love is Chemistry? That's not listed anywhere online (as far as I can tell), though a similar cut for the Polish dub is mentioned on the wiki. I wouldn't dare add it to the wiki myself because it's a memory from many years ago- but it is this sort of interesting change that got me into the hobby of studying(?) localization. Other changes far eclipse that one in effort; SpaceToon, an Arabic kids' network that aired a dub of My Little Pony, went to what must have been gargantuan digital paint effort in order to dejewify Twilight Sparkle's (the main character!) signature 6-pointed star symbol by removing one of the points... in every scene she appears in, across 9 seasons and plenty of specials and movies. They also added tights to the Equestria Girls. But I digress.
This post was supposed to be a guide to finding and translating international series. Before I begin with that, here's a disclaimer: all methods provided are for freedom of information only, and the legality of them depends on the specific circumstances, country, and platform. You as a consumer are responsible for your usage of them in ways that accord with what you're comfortable with. Now, let's begin with the tips.
Locating Media
Get a VPN as soon as you encounter any kind of region lock. In the 'old days', this was not so necessary. For a while, a free VPN from the web store would suffice, but now vendors tend to recognize those IPs and many of them lack crucial features like the ability to select your country. By all means, though, try the free options first.
Ensure before paying for anything that the VPN is well-reputed and able to bypass region locks. Some VPNs are one but not the other, some are both, some are neither.
Proton VPN has a plan for 10 dollars a month, per month. I don't endorse any particular VPN but I have tried it and the more expensive SurfShark among paid VPNs and both have worked for my region-lock-bypassing purposes.
I always pay per month and then cancel immediately; by next month, if I need it, I can buy another month, but the chances are good, especially in my case, that I'll be on to another series that doesn't require a VPN. This is how I handle most subscriptions.
Most VPNs offer longer-term plans that come out to cheaper costs per month, but require a lot of money upfront. It's easy to get suckered in by promises of $4.99 a month only to find out that you only get that by buying two years of the subscription at once for $120. This sort of thing makes the cheapest VPNs difficult to search for.
I always watch the English dub or sub of whatever I'm watching if one is available. Whether you do this is up to you. Looking up the English title as it appears on IMDB is usually enough to determine if one exists; the existence of one is often hinted at if there are official pages about it written in English, or official English listings on storefronts like Apple TV or Amazon Prime. Finding dubs streaming is loosely the same as finding natively English media. You have a better chance of finding this sort of thing when not in the country of origin, assuming you're in an English-speaking country. Many European shows that appear to be from non-English-speaking countries are nonetheless animated to an English audio track for lip-syncing, which can make it unclear which version is the 'dub' and which is the 'original'. Again, how you deal with this is up to you.
SEARCH FOR THE SHOW'S ORIGINAL LANGUAGE TITLE if there is no English version available. Search with the original script used- copy and paste it if you have to! Translate your browser page and view the results that way.
Sometimes the original title will be listed on IMDB, but often it won't be. In cases where only the English title is on IMDB, good practice is to go to the Wikipedia page for the media (if one exists) and use the language selector to get to the original language.
If none of that bears fruit, and searching for the English title and visiting various info pages to glean information about the original doesn't work either, try reverse searching for the cover image with any English text cropped out. Google Lens and Yandex can both do this sort of flexible image searching. More precise tools like TinEye may be of use too, but I wouldn't recommend going there first.
Google Chrome has a convenient one-step right-click translate button (in comparison to Safari which is a more complex process that is often unavailable, though it does have over Chrome that it also translates text in images; either way, choose a browser that can easily and reliably translate entire pages for ease of access.)
It's good practice to learn the equivalents for words like 'free' (of charge), 'streaming', 'watch online', 'episode list', in your target language. Rather than using Google Translate, use a bilingual dictionary to make sure you're finding a word with the correct meaning (as opposed to a translation of 'free' as 'liberated', for instance.) When searching, take a look at each page before and after you translate it, and note down any words or phrases you don't already have that translate to useful search terms.
If, for instance, a German website is helpful for locating information or streaming spots for a German show you watch, keep note of that site and check it again if you come across another German show in the list. This same principle applies for every country/language; if you find a solution that works for one series, chances are it will work for related others.
Not everything will be possible to find streaming online. This is crucial to know. If you're new to searching, don't get me wrong- it's quite possible you just haven't found it, be 'it' the English dub or the original version. You should keep looking! But in the end, not everything is online, and especially not everything is online for free. Paying for region-locked content can be a hassle even with a VPN; there are ways to get around this (buying a currency-unlocked or right-country gift card and using that+a hotel address in your target country, for instance), but in cases like this I have usually just purchased DVD sets instead.
Buy a DVD drive for your computer if it lacks one.
VLC Player and MakeMKV will be your best friends; download them.
Even if your DVD lacks subtitles, if you get the files onto your computer, you can translate and subtitle them using the tips in the next section.
If you can't find a streaming source or a DVD, you might be out of luck... but, just in case, because I'm passionate about the hobby, you can always shoot me an email at archnevesis@gmail.com with what you're looking for, and I'll try to help out. Why not? I'll also teach you the process I used to find it, if I indeed am able to find it.
Grabbing Existing Subtitles
If you can see subtitles in any language in the player for your chosen media, those subtitles are accessible somewhere for you to extract and export. The thing is, every platform handles subtitles differently, and there are also plenty of different methods to extract them. Some methods will work for many platforms, but none (as far as I know) will work for all.
Yt-dlp is the gold standard for this sort of thing: open source, actively supported, and compatible with hundreds of sites. On its own, it's a command-line program, but plenty of GUIs exist (GUI=graphical user interface, a way to use the program without typing commands into the terminal). You can do your own research and take your pick; there's even an online version that is useful but cannot access regionally locked content outside of its server location. Here are two GUIs that work on Mac and Windows, though there are plenty more for both. If you're on Linux, you probably don't even need instructions for figuring this sort of thing out.
There are subtitle extractor browser extensions. I can't vouch for any of them, but feel free to give them a try.
If you open inspect element/developer tools or its equivalent in your browser, you can bypass the need for external tools entirely and try to locate the subtitles in the file browser for the website. Here's a quick tutorial on how to do this, using the example of an episode of Petronella Apfelmus (English title Petronella Applewitch), one of the cartoons I watched while heading down the IMDB Rabbit Hole.
I should mention relatively early on that if the solutions listed don't work, there's a whole wide web of resources for doing this, so your best bet is looking up the name of the platform and following whichever leads you get. (Or contact me and I'll help- I know I keep saying this. I get no emails.)
After you have your subtitles, skip ahead to the section on translating them.
Downloading (if no subtitles included)
Guess what? Yt-dlp can do this too! If there are no subtitles included, try it out to get the video onto your computer. Then head to the next step, transcribing.
Same thing if you have a DVD: rip it with MakeMKV. (Note: I'm legally obligated to say, don't do this if it's illegal to do so.)
I have a tool called HandBrake that can turn MKVs into mp4s. This is necessary if your transcription tool doesn't support MKVs. This can also be done in a variety of conversion tools on the web.
Once you have your video, move ahead to the next step, transcribing it.
Transcribing
Let's bite the bullet: if you want passable subtitles without paying for a human to transcribe them, there is not really a plausible way to avoid machine learning entirely. If you have no reservations about this, skip to tip #2. I bring this up for those who'd like to avoid AI; there are, of course transcription tools that predate the boom of generative AI, like YouTube's automated subtitles (which, coupled with the YouTube autotranslator, made for a functional but incompetent way to watch crappy low-quality uploads of international dub episodes shrunken down with huge borders to avoid copyright) and Siri's speech recognition. Tools of this kind used a modular, compartmentalized architecture different from the end-to-end encoder-decoder contextual style used by modern tools (and influenced by the improvements to deep learning and neural networks brought forth by the AI boom.) However, they still utilized early underlying models, that, even if not called AI at the time, were deep learning neural nets trained on existing audio.
If you want to avoid the trappings of the modern transformer architectures & other such innovations associated with generative AI, there are tools available that still use the 'old methods'. I will be honest regarding my experiences as someone who was trying to do transcription/translation before the new architecture existed: the 'old methods' produce worse results, are often clunky to use, and are almost always heavily slanted in functionality towards one language (that's usually English). Because of their lesser efficacy I can't really vouch for them in terms of reccomendations but I felt I had to mention them:
Nuance Dragon (paid, Windows only)
YouTube auto-subtitles, unlike in the past, now also use a transformer architecture. Technically you could upload your file to YouTube, have it private, and grab the subtitles from there, but it's likely to be flagged as a copyright violation before you can, and that might jeopardize your account, so I would not recommend it.
With all that said, I've tried out plenty of transcription tools, both cloud-based and local. For English, most of them do a good job. However, for other languages, their quality seems to drop rapidly. For instance, I couldn't get Whisper, which can be installed locally, to work on German media- it was so prone to hallucinations that they outnumbered the correctly-transcribed lines. I've tried HappyScribe, ElevenLabs Scribe, and Sonix. My go-to is ElevenLabs Scribe, to the point that when I first discovered it (for an earlier historical cartoon subtitling project, creating English subs for one of the first ever TV cartoons, a very culturally questionable and partially lost show called Adventures of Pow Wow that was incorrectly listed as the first ever TV cartoon on Wikipedia when I started the subbing project- and that has most of its "lost" episodes available in the German dub) I was shocked by how well it worked. (Note: At the time- when making subs for Pow Wow, that is- rather than using the built-in ElevenLabs subtitle feature, I aggregated multiple translations and hand-timed the subtitles using a tool called Tero subtitler. So, if you seek out those subs, don't take them as an example of what ElevenLabs can do alone.)
One reason you might not want to use ElevenLabs is that ElevenLabs' speech to text service isn't their main service: that's text-to-speech (AI voices) and voice cloning. They were sued by a few voice actors in mid-2026 and then implemented a verification system for said voice cloning that made their userbase mad. Whether or not this turns you off from the unrelated speech to text tech they offer is up to you. There's always HappyScribe.
HappyScribe is fine too, and the best alternative to ElevenLabs Scribe I've tried. Sonix is worse than both of them. That's my experience, anyway. You can do your own research into what works best for you, but with a tool that works as well as ElevenLabs Scribe, I'm not tempted to try a bunch of other stuff just in case one of the others is better. Make sure to toggle on "include subtitles" when uploading your file.
There is a free plan for up to 30 minutes to try it out.
Keep in mind that even the very best tools for this are not perfect, especially when it comes to coined terms. Even human transcribers aren't perfect! Sometimes even the official subtitles aren't perfect. As someone who used to (as previously mentioned) trust Google Translate to auto-translate Youtube's already auto-generated subtitles, I have a high tolerance for imperfection, especially when the best of today's tools are so much better than in the past.
Despite a good deal of looking, I haven't found a good open source or free forever tool that works for my purposes. Whisper is the most common one you see recommended, and of course feel free to try it out, but it didn't work for me- including the larger models- and I tried several different ways of accessing it, with the same hallucination-heavy results every time.
Translating
Good news, there are multiple tools that will do it for free with google translate! Here's one by Syed Ghulam Akbar. Here's another: translatesubtitles.co. If you're happy enough with Google Translate-level translations and with lines ending and starting in odd places, that's all you need.
However... if you want higher-quality translation and more contextual understanding on the part of the tool doing the translation, you have other options. https://tools.newzone.top/en/subtitle-translator seems great and gives you access to a few other machine translators (i.e. non-LLM translators) like DeepL and Edge Translate- you can also use any AI API key you have.
I say it "seems" great because the tool I actually use is one that I might not fully recommend, because I have customized it to do what I want. It's yusufipk's "better srt translator", only I've modified it to include English as a supported language and use a free Openrouter api key (model set to openrouter/free, the rotating router that gives you whatever free model is available- this means translation quality is heavily variable). You can get a free Openrouter key and use it on the platform from the previous step- I only discovered it (IIRC) while checking my facts for this blog post.
I'm sure there are also local and self-hosted AI options. AI translation in large chunks is good for consistency and context, but unlike AI vs non-AI transcription, the gap between machine and LLM translation is not that significant on the higher end of machine translation, at least in my experience. (Mind you, though, things like Google and DeepL still use transformer architecture under the hood, just as most LLMs do- it's just that, rather than asking a larger model built for a wide variety of tasks to translate, machine translators are trained specifically and only to translate.)
As with transcription, no translation tool is perfect. Experienced human translators undoubtedly come out on top; I use a lot of machine translation since I watch a lot of international stuff, but I'd never recommend it if asked how to make a translation that will be used in an official capacity- at least not any of the tools I personally have experience with. But it is wonderful that tools like the ones I've brought up have made international media more accessible for everyone- if they want it. Much of the media I come across in my IMDB Rabbit Hole adventures is unlikely to ever get an English release, and fansubbers (as someone who did hacky 'research+Google Translate existing fansubs into English' sorts of things as a kid before AI) have their own whims that may not ever line up with your own. There's always the solution of fully learning the language yourself, and if that's what you'd rather do- respecting the languages the media has been released in already rather than translating them- more power to you. But this post just goes over how I do things.
Putting the subtitles onto the video
For streaming video, I use a free browser extension called Substital which has never let me down: https://substital.com/. Simply open the extension on your video page, select the video, and select your translated subtitle file, and that file will be played on the video just like any set of subtitles.
It was the first one of its kind I tried (IIRC) and it worked well enough I haven't tried any others after it.
For downloaded video, VLC player is your trusty friend. Play the video and go to subtitles->add subtitle track. If your subtitle track has the same name as your video file and is in the same folder, it'll even appear by default in VLC's subtitle track list! I've even found variants to work; e.g. if you have video.mp4, video_DE.srt, and video_EN.srt, all will show up as subtitle tracks. According to my research for this post, using a dot instead of an underscore (as in video.de.srt) will even apply the relevant language label to the subtitle track in VLC instead of showing up as a generic "Track 1" or 'Track 2".
I hope this has all helped. If you have recommendations for improving the workflow, or tools that work better or reach similar levels of quality to the ones I've listed (but improve on them by being open-source, local, or otherwise more transparent) I'd like to hear from you; your suggestions may be added to the guide! Keep in mind, however, that all that happens at my discretion.
Next time, I'll get into the actual first piece(s) of media I watched via IMDB rabbit hole.