I’ve been enjoying using Language Reactor so far, but I’ve encountered an issue that I believe could be relatively easy to address.
Currently, the timing of Language Reactor subtitles is synced to the subtitle track of the media’s original language rather than the user’s native language. This causes a problem when on-screen text appears in the target language. For instance, in such cases, the English subtitle track would usually translate this text, but the media’s native subtitle track does not include it since it’s already on-screen. When Language Reactor is enabled, I need to either disable it or switch the subtitle language to English temporarily to view the translation, then switch back.
A specific example: I’m watching the 2004 anime Monster on Netflix, with my native language set to English and my target language to Japanese. In the first episode, there is a prologue wall of text displayed in Japanese. Since Language Reactor is looking at the Japanese subtitle track, it doesn’t show any subtitles, even though the English subtitle track provides a translation for the text.
It would be great if Language Reactor could account for these scenarios. Thank you for considering this!
While waiting for LanguageReactor to implement a similar feature, I highly recommend using an extension called asbplayer. It’s a comprehensive toolset for mining sentences using subtitles. It can also be used alongside LR for a synergistic experience.
To optimize its compatibility with LR, you might want to adjust some settings, such as disabling asbplayer’s back and forward seek hotkeys.
Additionally, pressing the down arrow toggles asbplayer’s subtitles, which can display both the target language and your native language. Unlike LR, asbplayer isn’t as strict about showing the target language, so if it’s unavailable, it will still display your selected native language if possible.
Just a suggestion—it’s an excellent tool to pair with LR!
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me - I’ve been usign LR and asbplayer together for a while now.
Unforntually no, the two extensions don’t communicate with each other. So if the show you’re watching doesn’t have a translation in your native language, asbplayer wouldn’t be aware of LR’s ASR - if LR allowed us to download the generated ASR sub track, then it could be loaded into asbplayer.
Ah, thats a shame. I have a migaku sub and my primary use case for LR is to watch dubbed content on netflix w/ ASR subtitles. If Im understanding you correctly, I cant use asbplayer to mine that content either?
Right, asbplayer, simply reads the subtitle files and does work from there. If you have Migaku, it pretty much covers the feature set of asbplayer, plus all of the AI stuff. LR, is the only language learning tool I know of that uses ASR right now. Maybe the other add-ons will eventually catch up.
LR’s dev team is pretty small right now and new features trickle in. A lot is one their TODO list.
migaku actually uses ASR on youtube. Been on ios for a over a month and just launched on the extension! Hopefully they get it on netflix soon so I can easily mine dubbed anime.
Oh nice! I’ll have to give Migaku another try then. That’s one of the reasons I switched back over to LR. Could you imagine Migaku/LR ASR on something like Crunchyroll?!