youtube-chinese-localizer

Automate YouTube video translation into Simplified Chinese subtitles and Mandarin dubbing by running a shell script that handles downloading, speech-to-text transcription, translation, and audio mixing.

Localizing foreign video content for a Chinese audience involves an end-to-end pipeline that transcribes audio, translates text into Simplified Chinese, generates Mandarin dubbing, and exports the final mixed video.

Generating Chinese subtitles and dubbing requires specific APIs and tools: faster-whisper for transcription, Volcengine TranslateText for translation, and Volc TTS for Mandarin audio synthesis.

Processing local video files for Mandarin dubbing is fully supported; you can pass a local video file directly to the localization script instead of a YouTube URL to generate translated subtitles and dubbed audio.

Faster-whisper works for video localization by performing speech-to-text transcription on the video's audio track, which is then translated by Volcengine TranslateText into Simplified Chinese subtitles before Mandarin dubbing.

A limitation of using Volc TTS for video dubbing is that it only generates Mandarin speech from translated text, meaning the pipeline is strictly specialized for Simplified Chinese localization and not other target languages.