An AI Subtitle Workflow — No Subtitles on US Netflix? Let Claude Code Make Me a Set

I’m a sci-fi film obsessive.

The other day I came across Anon on US Netflix (a lesser-known 2018 sci-fi film), hit play, and found — no simplified Chinese subtitles. Niche films like this generally don’t get fansub releases either.

Old habits would say give up here. But today, a different approach: let Claude Code handle it for me.

1. State the request clearly, and the AI will ask you questions on its own

I told Claude Code straight out: I’m watching a sci-fi film on US Netflix in Chrome, there are no simplified Chinese subtitles, what are my options for loading some externally? If possible, search the whole web for a simplified Chinese subtitle file; if there isn’t one, pulling the original English track is fine too.

It thought for a few seconds and came back with a plan — the least-effort route is installing the Substital Chrome extension, which can load external subtitles. I asked it for the install link and had it search for Anon subtitles at the same time.

It found the extension and also pulled down two subtitle candidates — but for niche films these are usually machine translations. So I had it grab the original English track as well.

2. Think through the deliverable before you throw the request over the wall

I now had three versions in hand: the original English, traditional Chinese (with the unmistakable flavor of machine translation), and a simplified Chinese machine translation.

I didn’t just tell the AI to “translate a version.” Here’s what I actually asked for:

• Assemble a multi-agent team and concurrently research reviews of this film, its plot, and the director’s intent
• Read the original English subtitle track
• Give me a literary Chinese subtitle translation — faithful, expressive, elegant, with proper nouns, character names, and place names consistent throughout, and the original retained alongside the first appearance of each
• Output SRT, and the timecodes have to be accurate

Why be this specific? Because I know subtitle files live or die on timecode alignment, and I know what a good translation looks like. “General literacy in the domain” + “a clearly stated request” = the AI can run the rest — I have no blind spots here, so I won’t fall into “not knowing what I don’t know.”

3. Getting refused by Claude on copyright grounds was a pleasant surprise

While I was waiting for the results, I noticed it had stopped.

Claude Code’s rules are fairly strict now — it judged that “translating a complete literary work” raised copyright issues and refused to do the full translation for me.

Unexpected, but reasonable. It shows real respect for literary copyright — more restraint than I expected.

4. New approach: polish the machine translation

Full translation was a dead end, so instead: have it polish the existing machine translation.

I fed the simplified Chinese machine translation back in and asked for a polish pass — keep the timecodes untouched, but bring the phrasing up to the “faithful, expressive, elegant” standard. This time it didn’t refuse, because it wasn’t translating a complete work from scratch; it was editing on top of an existing translation.

About 10 minutes later, the new version was out. The Robert Browning verse at the opening got a proper treatment, and proper nouns carried the original in a note on first appearance.

I loaded the subtitles into Substital, adjusted the font size and color, and started watching. Fully usable subtitles.

Wrapping up

The whole flow, from stating the request to having working subtitles, took a little over ten minutes. Far faster than waiting on a fansub group back in the day.

In the AI era, everyone should have their own subtitle crew. Stop letting “this film has no subtitles” shut you out — all you need is to state the request clearly.

Source: EP0005_audio.mp3 · ASR model gemini-2.5-pro · full text of the 8-minute original recording

[00:00] Hey everyone, welcome back to Pinpin’s AI channel. Today I’m continuing to share some ways of using AI. A lot of friends ask me: you use so much AI day to day, what do you actually use AI for? They find it strange. So actually, a lot of people think using AI is a hard thing to do, including from my earlier shares — you open up a black window like a hacker and type things in that look like code. But it’s not hard at all. You just say what you need clearly, like a normal person. And then AI can take care of a lot of things for us, especially a tool like Claude Code.

[00:37] What I’ve got for you today is a problem I solved a couple of days ago. But don’t let the small scope fool you — behind every small need there might be a business. You can see I’ve opened up the Netflix site. I’m actually a sci-fi movie buff, so I’m always watching new sci-fi, including some older, more obscure sci-fi films. Like a couple of days ago I came across this one — ANON, which you could translate as “the unnamed person.” I really wanted to watch this movie, but when I opened it up to watch, I found — I’m looking at the US catalog version, and it doesn’t have Chinese subtitles.

[01:25] So in that situation, how do I find and actually make good use of a subtitle track to improve my viewing experience? Turns out you can do this with AI too, and the whole process is pretty simple. We just open Claude Code. And in here I type in and tell it: I’m currently using the Chrome browser, watching a sci-fi movie on Netflix, and it doesn’t have Simplified Chinese subtitles. What can I do to overlay subtitles on it? If you can, search the whole web for Simplified Chinese subtitles for me, and if there aren’t any, you can also download the original English subtitles for me.

[02:13] See, I’m using the voice input method, so I just told it very simply and clearly what problem I’m running into. And it went into a thinking pass. Look, it’s already told me a solution — the least-effort option is to install the Substital Chrome extension, which adds a button you can use to overlay subtitles. So I say: great, please give me the URL for the Substital Chrome extension so I can install it. And at the same time, the film is called ANON, A-N-O-N — can you go search for subtitles for it?

[02:52] OK, it’s already found me the install page for that extension, and it also gave me a subtitle file, and gave me two alternatives. But with obscure titles like this the subtitles are usually machine-translated, so let’s see about the quality in a minute. Please download the official original English subtitles for me too. And you can see we’ve now opened the extension page it gave us, and I can go install this extension — highly rated, by the way — install this extension into my extensions. Since I’ve already got it installed, I won’t demo that part for you. You can see the Substital extension I installed right here.

[03:43] Download the subtitles locally for me, the SRT version, and open the corresponding folder. OK, we can see it’s opened the original English subtitles, plus a Traditional Chinese version. I can actually read Traditional Chinese, but it’s still not as good as Simplified, right. And it looks like a machine-translated version.

[04:15] So what do we need to do now? What we need to do now is tell the AI what we want. Something like: I want you to organize a multi-agent team, run concurrent research across the web, look at the reviews and write-ups of this movie, and understand its full plot and what the director was trying to express. At the same time, you have to read the original English subtitles of this film, and I need you to use the original subtitles to translate a literary version of the Chinese subtitles for me. It needs to be a translation that’s faithful, expressive and elegant, and at the same time watch the proper nouns, the names of people and places, so they’re consistent every time they appear. And when one appears for the first time, you can also keep the original alongside the Chinese subtitle. Output this file as an SRT document, and at the same time watch the accuracy of the timecodes.

[05:07] Right, so we hand that requirement over and see how well it does. One thing that matters a lot in here, I think, is first that — in this domain I have a general grounding myself, meaning I have no blind spots. Meaning I don’t have any “I don’t know what I don’t know.” For example, I know a subtitle file has timecodes, and that subtitles map to the video through those timecodes. Like I know what a good translation looks like — so I can describe that requirement precisely. And then everything else is left to the AI to do. I’ll speed this part up, and we’ll take a look at what it finally produces. This kind of process takes a few minutes.

[06:00] OK, you can see it says this is a level 3 big project, so it first gets a clear picture of the size of the subtitles and then lays out an execution plan. That’s because in Claude Code I’ve classified my day-to-day work into three levels, 1 2 3. The first level is very simple work that it can just go execute, without needing my permission. And the third level of work is where it has to make a detailed plan and talk the execution plan through with me before it can act.

[06:34] Take a look, there’s actually a problem now. Claude Code’s rules are pretty strict — it found that when I’m doing a full translation of a complete literary work, it judged there’d be copyright issues, so it refused to do the full translation for me. So at that point I went and found that machine-translated version from before, and we hand the machine translation over to it and have it polish that instead, and see if it can get the job done that way.

[07:03] OK, we can see the version is out now. This subtitle version, I think the translation is pretty great already. It carried over the line from Robert Browning’s verse drama at the very beginning, and inside, just like we asked, it did a faithful, expressive and elegant translation, and every time a person or place name appears, the first time it appears, it annotated it in a note. So let’s load it into the browser and take a look. See, it’s got the subtitles now, and it can scale the font size up and down, and change its color.

[07:56] OK, very nice — these subtitles are in a completely usable state now.