
Show HN: Tern – Subtitle File Translator (Google Translator Toolkit Replacement) - agoodob
http://tern.1c7.me/
======
agoodob
Hi, Hacker News community. My name is Zheng Cheng, a 24 years old developer
live in Guangzhou, China.

I built this Desktop app, it can translate subtitle files like .srt .ass .vtt.
it supports 9 different service providers like Google, Amazon, Azure, Yandex,
etc.

Please check it out, any advice or suggestion is welcome! Thank you!

~~~
yorwba
For the English landing page, I'd suggest translating from another language
into English, rather than from English to Chinese. I assume you built this app
for yourself so you can watch technical videos in English with Chinese
subtitles to help your understanding. But when you market this to others, you
need to show how the product fits the customer's situation, not yours.

I'm not sure about the API key setting. Does it mean that whoever uses your
program needs to get their own key for a translation service, which will bill
them for their API usage? In that case, you really need to explain this and
how to get one. Not everyone knows what an API even is!

However, I think it would be better design to handle the API keys on your end
and simply give them a drop-down menu for choosing a provider. You get billed
by the provider and then you bill them with a markup.

1 million characters is kind of a lot for a free plan. Who translates so many
subtitled videos per month that they'd hit that limit? Only professional
subtitlers come to mind, and they might be able to pay a lot more than just
$9. If you want to make a profit, you should probably rethink your pricing
strategy.

I think you might be able to offer your service to subtitling groups in China,
but I'm not sure how much those would be able to pay. (I guess many are
hobbyists who don't make any money.) You could try contacting some of them to
get a feeling whether they'd find machine translation useful to speed up their
work, and how much that'd be worth to them.

EDIT: Found [https://1c7.me/subtitle-translation-
helper/](https://1c7.me/subtitle-translation-helper/) Since you're already
targeting subtitling groups, I guess you know what you're doing.

~~~
agoodob
* Yes, I do need to explain what API is. Or maybe make it easier to remove this thing altogether, just charged a markup.

* hmm. Maybe I should lower the free plan 1 million characters. maybe 50k is about right.

* $9 is probably too low, you are right.

* Yes, many of these subtitling group are doing it completely for free, just a hobby

