# WJS Translating Subtitles — guide skill for captions & subtitles

> **For AI agents:** find the right skill in one call — `curl -s "https://skills.varg.ai/api/search?q=<what the person wants>"` returns the matching use case and the best skills with install commands, as markdown (Russian works too). Full index: https://skills.varg.ai/llms.txt. Every page has a markdown twin: add `.md` to its path. Before generating anything, show the person the options on the use-case page.

Translate an SRT to Chinese, English or another language and re-cut cues at real punctuation; bilingual SRTs too.

- **Type:** [Guide](https://skills.varg.ai/guides.md) · [Captions & subtitles](https://skills.varg.ai/browse/skills/captions.md)
- **Slug:** `wjs-translating-subtitles`
- **Status:** live
- **Publisher:** Jian Shuo Wang (community)
- **License:** MIT
- **Source:** https://github.com/jianshuo/claude-skills/tree/main/wjs-translating-subtitles
- **Works in:** Claude Code, Codex
- **Cost:** Free — instructions only; the agent translates
- **Adoption:** 217 installs, 137 GitHub stars (GitHub + skills.sh, 2026-10-26)

## What it does

Text-only subtitle translation from Wang Jianshuo's video-localization pipeline. It translates a source SRT or pasted transcript with subtitle-length rules (about 15 Chinese or 42 Latin characters a line, two lines max), then re-segments so every cue ends at a real punctuation mark, splitting or merging cues with timestamps interpolated by character position. Output is target-only, bilingual (source line over target line) or three-language SRT, with file-naming conventions and a quality gate; Simplified Chinese and English are the tested targets. Instructions only; burn-in and dubbing live in sibling skills of the same repo.

## Use when

- Translate an SRT into Chinese or English
- Bilingual (中英双语) subtitles
- Fix cues that end mid-sentence before dubbing or burn-in

## Not for

- Making the source SRT (transcribe first)
- Burn-in or voice dubbing (sibling skills; for burn-in see ffmpeg-captions-subtitles)

## Install

- Claude Code: `npx skills add https://github.com/jianshuo/claude-skills --skill wjs-translating-subtitles`
- Codex: `npx skills add https://github.com/jianshuo/claude-skills --skill wjs-translating-subtitles`

## More captions & subtitles skills

- [3D Camera Captions](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/hyperframes-camera-3d-captions.md): Captions that live in 3D around a talking head: the camera flies through the words, heroes pass behind the speaker.
- [Remotion Captions](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/remotion-captions.md): Transcribe speech and burn in animated captions with Remotion, or import an existing SRT file.
- [ElevenLabs Speech to Text](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/elevenlabs-speech-to-text.md): Transcribe audio and video with word timestamps, speaker labels and keyterms, ready for subtitles.
- [ElevenLabs Speech to Text (inference.sh)](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/inference-sh-elevenlabs-stt.md): Transcribe audio with ElevenLabs Scribe, speaker diarization and forced alignment, via inference.sh.
- [Speech to Text](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/inference-sh-speech-to-text.md): Transcribe audio with ElevenLabs Scribe v2 or Whisper V3 Large, with timestamps and speaker labels.
- [Pretext Text Metrics](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/pretext-yaniv-golan.md): Measure and fit text without the DOM using pretext: auto-fit sizes, know line breaks before render, canvas/WebGL text.