Why Pay for Subtitles Translations?

Well, I may have mentioned this dozens of times in past, if not more, as my comment replies that I will try to keep the subtitles translation service for free as long as it’s technically feasible. Fortunately, things haven’t changed much yet and it’s still possible to offer this for free. Google and Yandex translators both still provide free translation widgets, and using any these for translating subtitles is still provided free of cost on this website.

However, there are some premium translation services, like DeepL, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, which, unfortunately, are no longer free (and some were never free from the start). On top of that, their translation API cost is so expensive that I simply can’t afford to integrate and open these to public for free. Like Microsoft Azure charges around $10 for one million characters. Which doesn’t sounds that much at first, but is roughly around $2 dollar for a normal size subtitle file. DeepL is even more expensive and charges around $25 per million characters. So, with this price cost, even with approx. 10 translations per day, you can see how expensive this can get very quickly and hard to keep up as free service.

But all this being said, the quality of some of these translators, especially DeepL, is so much better than their free counterpart that a few of you looking for premium quality have asked me in the past for their support nevertheless; and are even willing to pay for these. So here we are – where I’m trying to introduce a new payment model. Here you, as users of these services, have to pay for the translation on demand for these translators.

I’m also thinking of building some community payment model soon, which will be more like payment pool based on donations and voluntary contributions from community. This way some of you who can’t afford to pay will still be able to enjoy few of these premium services. But first, I will first see what kind of response I get from you all about this new scheme.

That’s all for now. As always, if you have any other suggestion or comments, please do share below.