There is no “later”
Subtitles appear about a sentence behind the speaker. For a stream, a broadcast or a match commentary that is the whole difference between following it and reading about it tomorrow.
Translate a live stream while it is still live
A recorded video can be downloaded and fed to a translator later. A live stream cannot: it is understood now or not at all. This is the case SubLive was actually built for — speech arrives, and the translation is a sentence behind it.
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What makes this case different
The window stays above the stream
Subtitles float in their own window, above the player and above other applications — so a full-screen stream and a translation can be on the same screen.
Streams that switch languages
The spoken language is detected automatically for 10 languages — Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish — and the subtitles keep up when a stream switches between two of them mid-sentence, as international streams constantly do. If the streamer speaks any other language, you name the spoken language once before you start.
How it works here
Open the stream in Chrome
Twitch, YouTube Live, a news channel, a sports broadcast, a conference feed.
Start subtitles from the toolbar
One click on the tab you are watching. The sound keeps playing to your speakers as before.
Move the window where it does not cover the action
Drag it anywhere; size, position and font stay for next time.
What it will not do
- Subtitles are for you to read, not to publish. Redistributing a translated transcript of someone else's broadcast is their call, not ours — ask them first.
- Streaming services that protect their audio do not hand it to the extension, and SubLive does not attempt to get around that.
- Music, crowd noise and several people shouting at once are the hardest input there is. Commentary over a stadium will not read like a studio interview.
Questions people ask about this
- How far behind the speaker is it?
- About one sentence. Speech is only translated once the speaker finishes a phrase, because translating half a sentence produces confident nonsense — the ends of sentences carry the meaning in most languages.
- Does it work on Twitch and YouTube Live?
- Yes. Both play their audio in an ordinary tab, which is all SubLive needs. The same is true of news channels, radio players and sports broadcasts that stream in the browser.
- Does watching a four-hour stream cost four hours of balance?
- Yes — the meter runs while subtitles are on, and pausing them stops it. For long viewing, buy hours in a larger pack: the price per hour drops and bought hours never expire.
Useful for this
How SubLive compares with meeting bots and built-in captions →