Building Li Translate: An Open-Source AI Subtitle Generator with Natural AI Translation 🚀

Ali Akrami — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:19:16 +0000

Building Li Translate: An Open-Source AI Subtitle Generator That Actually Understands Context

Subtitle generation has improved dramatically over the last few years, but most existing tools still suffer from the same problems.

They either require expensive cloud APIs, produce literal translations that ignore context, or force users into workflows that are difficult to automate.

I started Li Translate to solve those issues.

The goal is simple:

Generate high-quality subtitles with natural AI translation while remaining open, extensible, and developer-friendly.

Why another subtitle tool?

Most subtitle generators focus on only one part of the pipeline.

Some are excellent at speech recognition but weak at translation.

Others translate well but don’t produce synchronized subtitles.

Many depend entirely on proprietary cloud services, making them expensive or impossible to self-host.

Li Translate is designed around a complete workflow instead of a single feature.

The vision is to make subtitle generation feel like a modern AI pipeline rather than a collection of disconnected tools.

The idea

A typical workflow looks like this:

Detect spoken language
Generate accurate timestamps
Produce subtitle segments
Translate them naturally using AI
Preserve timing and formatting
Export standard subtitle formats

Instead of translating each sentence independently, the system is designed to understand surrounding context, leading to translations that sound much more natural.

Why open source?

Open source tools move faster.

Developers can inspect the pipeline, improve models, fix bugs, and integrate the project into their own products.

Whether you’re building a media platform, an education product, a localization service, or an automation workflow, you shouldn’t have to reinvent subtitle generation.

That’s exactly why Li Translate is open.

Designed for developers

The project aims to be:

Modular
API-friendly
Easy to self-host
Extensible
Automation-ready

The long-term goal is to make every part of the subtitle pipeline replaceable.

Want a different speech recognition model?

Swap it.

Want another translation model?

Plug it in.

Need a custom export format?

Add it.

Roadmap

Some of the features planned for future releases include:

Better multilingual support
Faster subtitle generation
Speaker-aware subtitle generation
Batch processing
REST API
Docker deployment
GPU and CPU optimization
Additional export formats
Improved AI translation quality

Who is this for?

Li Translate is intended for:

Content creators
Video editors
Localization teams
AI researchers
Developers
Open-source contributors

If your work involves subtitles or multilingual media, this project is built for you.

Looking for contributors

This project is still evolving, and there is plenty of room for new ideas.

Whether you’re interested in AI, speech recognition, translation, backend development, frontend development, or DevOps, contributions are welcome.

If you’d like to help shape the future of open-source subtitle generation, I’d love to hear your ideas.

⭐ If you find the project interesting, consider giving it a star.

Repository:
https://github.com/AliAkrami1375/Li-Translate

DEV Community: Ali Akrami

Building Li Translate: An Open-Source AI Subtitle Generator with Natural AI Translation 🚀