Translation & LLM

Translation & LLM

Sublarr supports optional subtitle translation. Translation is off by default and is treated as an experimental feature — turn it on only if you need it. Backends fall into two camps:

• Cloud backends (DeepL, Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, Google, Azure, MyMemory) — currently the most reliable choice for production-grade output. Subtitle text leaves your server.
• Ollama (local LLM) — fully offline, no API keys, no data egress. Quality is improving but still rough at the edges; use general-purpose models like qwen2.5:14b or llama3.1:8b.

Note

Custom anime fine-tunes that we’ve published in the past (anime-translator-*) are currently broken; please don’t pull them. If a stable replacement ships, this page will name it explicitly.

Configuring Ollama

Install Ollama on the host that runs Sublarr (or on a reachable LAN host), pull a general-purpose model, then point Sublarr at it:

ollama pull qwen2.5:14b-instruct
# or, lighter:
ollama pull llama3.1:8b-instruct

Set in Settings → Translation → Backends → Ollama:

Field	Example
Endpoint URL	http://ollama:11434
Model	qwen2.5:14b-instruct

Translation Backends

Sublarr ships 12 translation backends (Lingarr parity). Configure them in Settings → Translation Backends. Every backend records per-call cost, latency and token usage; visit Settings → Translation → Cost & Memory to compare.

Backend	Type	Self-Hosted	API Key	Best For
Ollama	Local LLM	Yes	No	Full control, custom prompts, GPU-accelerated
OpenAI-compatible	LLM	Both	Yes	GPT-4 / local OpenAI-compatible endpoints
OpenAI ChatGPT	LLM API	No	Yes	GPT-4o / GPT-4-turbo via official endpoint
Anthropic Claude	LLM API	No	Yes	High-quality long-context translation
Google Gemini	LLM API	No	Yes	Fast Gemini 2.x with native multilingual support
DeepSeek	LLM API	No	Yes	Cost-effective Chinese-LLM provider
Mistral	LLM API	No	Yes	EU-hosted LLM, GDPR-friendly
DeepL	NMT API	No	Yes	Highest-quality NMT for EU languages
Google Translate	NMT API	No	Yes	Broad language support, fast
LibreTranslate	NMT API	Yes	Optional	Self-hosted, privacy-focused fallback
Azure Translator	NMT API	No	Yes	Enterprise-grade NMT with regional endpoints
MyMemory	NMT API	No	Optional	Free tier, useful as zero-cost fallback

Tip

The Live Translation Queue dashboard (Activity → Translation Queue) shows in-flight jobs across all backends with per-job cancellation. Cancelled jobs raise JobCancelledError so partial work is rolled back cleanly.

Configuring Ollama (Default):

1. Install Ollama on your server
2. Pull a model: ollama pull qwen2.5:14b-instruct
3. In Sublarr: Settings > Translation Backends > Ollama
4. Enter your Ollama URL and model name
5. Click Test to verify

Fallback Chains: Configure backup backends in case your primary fails. Example:

1. Primary: Ollama (local, fast, free)
2. Fallback 1: DeepL (cloud, high quality)
3. Fallback 2: LibreTranslate (self-hosted backup)

Chat API & Series Context (V9+)

See Settings → Translation → Ollama Chat API for the full reference including how to configure system prompts and series context injection.