Hacker News Reader

Comment by bemmu | Hacker News Reader

I gave it a try. Comment if you want me to try some other videos or target languages.

Elon Musk on Joe Rogan, English to Finnish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOkOafhAsDE

I'm a native Finnish speaker and while it starts off a bit strange, when they get to the mid to latter part it is really incredible, it's like an alternative universe where they were somehow born Finnish.

Putin talking about AI, Russian to English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSkjQJcqaFo

Paul Graham interview "What are some common mistakes founders make?" from English to Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq_G0VXJ1xk

This one didn't work out so well. While some parts are decent, others sound like nonsense. But super cool it included pg blowing into the mic in the translation!

Pulp Fiction to Finnish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdLChf-0pFE

Half of the time it sounds like a professional dub, but sometimes gets confused.

View on HN

Translating the Paul Graham video to Croatian works surprisingly well.

(As a non-native speaker) several bits of the Japanese transcription were just Japanese-sounding noise, and the prosody was completely all over the place in the bits that were actually Japanese. The dub does get across most of the things being talked about, but I wouldn't consider it an acceptable dub (even for most of the bits where it is actually in Japanese).

I wonder if reason is that the dubbing works better between more similar languages and struggles when dealing with disparate languages. I don't speak Chinese or Korean, but it would be interesting to see how well their dubs are.

Can you do another video into Japanese, to see if it's just an issue with the Paul Graham video? Also, how about translating from another language to English?

Here's another example:

Steve Jobs on death | Walter Isaacson and Lex Fridman (EN->JP): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YiJLDhcWSI

Maybe it does better on longer videos, but as someone who is fairly well-versed in Japanese this one was not a good result either. There is also a bit of wonkiness in this one, where in the dub Lex says some of Walter's lines and vice-versa, and at one point both of them repeat verbatim the same exact translated phrase which doesn't correspond to anything said in the original.

Good idea, added a Putin video translated from Russian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSkjQJcqaFo

I love the slow whispered "Thaaank Yooooouuuu" at :10.

Translating the Musk video to french is weird. What's interesting is that sometimes protagonists speak with an accent from Quebec, and sometimes with kind of an old school voice from some old french movie. There's a laugh in the sequence, which is translated with again some audio quality that belongs to an old french movie.

Here's Boris Johnson speaking German. It really does sound like his voice:

https://youtu.be/J4nxHqblzKA

I wonder if they're breaking Youtube's (and others) TOS by downloading the videos to work their AI magic on them?

Back to the Future to Finnish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvvqUv6YYhc

I laughed because the voices are so out there, and then it made two little funny mistakes that caught me off guard when I was already laughing, so I could only switch to crying at that point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com