Brazil’s economic boom is attracting many students and professionals to the country. As most of the foreigners don’t speak Portuguese, they can’t understand local TV shows. So, Easy Way language center decided to make their lives a little easier by creating a web service that combines Closed Captioning technology with Google Translate to provide subtitles for Brazilian TV in any language.

To put this together, we hooked a computer to the TV set 24 hours a day to capture and upload the captions to our server to be translated and displayed.

So far, over 1m lines of subtitles were translated on the website and all classes are sold out.

Easy Way Subtitles was created specifically for the brand Easy Way, a language center in Brazil. And it provides a useful service for its target users: exchange students and other expats in Brazil. Except the production budget, no investment or seed capital of any kind was received.

This project made use of two existing technologies but in order to combine them we needed to create a completely new system. The solution makes use of Arduino boards and a computer to capture the closed captioning data from the TV signal and upload it all to the web server.

The time between when something is said on TV and when the translated subtitle is displayed should be as close to zero as possible, and this is a crucial point for the service to succeed. With normal conditions of internet speed we could reduce this gap to about half a second.

Roughly, that’s the flow: We noticed that the closed captioning data as provided half a second before the line is actually said on TV (except in live shows). It usually takes half a second to upload the data, and an extra half a second is used by Google to translate and send the text back.

The next stage of development will probably be a partnership with Smart TV makers to include our idea/service in the core system of newer TVs.

The goal is to build more awareness to the brand. The partnership with Smart TV makers could help spread the service and the brand’s name even more.

So far, over 1 MM lines of subtitles were translated and all Easy Way classes are sold out. The service is live at easywaysubtitles.com