Banshaku no Ryuugi Season 1 English Subtitles (AI)
What is this?
Banshaku no Ryuugi is a 2022 Japanese drama that aired on TV Tokyo that falls into the wonderful category of “chill food drama” popularized by Midnight Diner and Solitary Gourmet.
Follow Miyuki, a dedicated real estate agent, through season one’s eight episodes as she navigates the challenges of work and life while pursuing her passion for the perfect evening drink. Each episode explores Miyuki’s approach to both her career and her after-work rituals, taking viewers from grocery stores to her kitchen where unexpected food and drink pairings come to life.
Download subtitles
The subtitle files are in SRT format and the copyrighted video is not included.
How was this translated?
Like the majority of Japanese shows, Banshaku no Ryuugi is unlikely to receive the individual attention needed by a company or fans required for a translation to English. AI translation brings a fascinating proposition to such media - but what about the quality?
Enter GUI-Subtrans, which certainly uses no magic but has a smartly engineered default instruction/prompt set which, when combined with Claude AI’s Sonnet 3.5 via their paid API (this season cost me $2.16 of usage), can return completely acceptable subtitles for many TV shows and movies without any tweaking by the user. It’s certainly not perfect, but there’s a surprising lack of distractingly bad sentences and unclear meanings making it entirely watchable - and more importantly, enjoyable.
A challenge with translating subtitles is that subtitle files are not written like the show’s script. The lines are broken up into bite-size chunks with an attached timestamp for the duration that they display. This causes traditional translation services to do a much poorer job with subtitles than other forms of written content, as they can’t deduce that two subtitle lines are actually a single sentence broken apart. However, AI, using the right prompts/tools, can.
Interestingly, the exhaustive instruction set that GUI-Subtrans includes appears to increase the quality of the translation in an order of magnitude. When testing Translatesrt.online, which promisingly uses GPT-4o under the hood, the results were underwhelming. While GUI-Subtrans resulted in Miyaki saying, “I can overlook this expense.” when picking fish off the shelf, Translatesrt.online ended up with “Let’s close our eyes to this much.”, the sort of distractingly bad sentence you’d expect out of automated translation.
This opens a new era of media consumption. Japan produces most of its media for internal consumption and official jdrama translations outside of Netflix. Fan subtitles are amazing and give a superior experience, but considering the individuals are doing challenging work for free, there are a limited number of fan subbers operating, leaving many shows unsubbed.