SubSelect — Interactive Subtitles

Click or select words in video subtitles to look them up, copy them and save them while you watch.

Watch anything with subtitles. Click a word you don't know. Keep watching. SubSelect turns the subtitles already on your screen into text you can click, select and copy. Click a word and a small panel opens next to it with the translation, the article and plural, the verb forms, and a native-speaker recording — right there over the video, without pausing your learning to open a dictionary tab. It is built for German first, and it handles thirteen subtitle languages. WHAT YOU CAN DO • Click a word — one click selects exactly that word and looks it up. • Drag across several words to look up a whole phrase. • Double-click to take the entire caption line. • Copy what you selected, exactly as it was written, umlauts and ß included. • Save a word with the sentence it appeared in, the site and the date, and export the whole list later as CSV or JSON. • Have the video pause itself while you read, and resume when you clear the selection. SubSelect only ever resumes a video it paused — press play whenever you like and it stays out of the way. • Hear the word. Human recordings from Wikimedia Commons where one exists, your browser's own speech synthesis where it doesn't. WHAT THE PANEL TELLS YOU For German, the things a learner actually needs, not just a one-word gloss: • the article and gender — der, die or das • the plural • the verb forms: Präsens, Präteritum, Partizip II, Konjunktiv II, Imperativ, and which auxiliary the verb takes • the IPA pronunciation • synonyms and the broader term • the dictionary definition, and a machine translation when no dictionary has the word The dictionary is asked before the machine translator, because a translation memory asked for a single word out of context will confidently give you the wrong one. IT DOESN'T TOUCH YOUR SUBTITLES SubSelect reads the caption the player has already drawn and puts its own words exactly on top, in the player's font, at the player's size. Your subtitles look the same with it on as with it off. It is a language tool, not a subtitle-appearance tool. WHERE IT WORKS SubSelect works wherever a video player puts its subtitle text into the page. That covers the major streaming services, the general video platforms, online course players, and video files you open in Chrome from your own computer. On a handful of well-known video sites it switches itself on by itself. Those sites are exactly the ones Chrome names in the permission list when you install it, so you can see the whole set before you decide. Everywhere else it stays completely dormant until you ask for it: open the toolbar popup and press "Enable on this site". Nothing runs on a site you haven't enabled. Turn the site's own subtitles on first. SubSelect never enables captions for you. WHAT IT CANNOT DO Said plainly, because a tool that pretends is worse than one that tells you: • Subtitles that are pictures rather than text — bitmap or DVD-style tracks — have no words to click. • Subtitles burned into the video image are part of the picture. • Some players draw captions to a canvas, where no text exists in the page. In every one of those cases SubSelect tells you interactive subtitles aren't available for that player, rather than guessing. It never touches the video stream, never interferes with DRM, and never downloads video or subtitle files. FREE SERVICES, NO ACCOUNT, NO KEY Out of the box SubSelect uses free and open services that need no sign-up: MyMemory and Lingva Translate for translation, Wiktionary and the Free Dictionary API for definitions and grammar, Wikimedia Commons for pronunciation. It tries them in turn and uses whichever answers first, so one service being down or rate limited is not a dead end. If you would rather use something else, you can: Chrome's built-in on-device translation, your own LibreTranslate instance, DeepL with your own key, or any endpoint you point it at. PRIVACY • SubSelect asks for no access to any website when you install it. • Online lookups are off until you accept the terms and grant access. Until then, selecting, copying and saving all still work, and nothing is sent anywhere. • When lookups are on, what leaves your device is the text you selected and the subtitle line around it, sent to the provider you approved, at the moment you ask for a lookup — and at no other time. Nothing runs in the background. • Your saved words stay in your browser. They are never uploaded, and exports are written on your device. • API keys are stored locally and sent only to the endpoint you entered them for. • No account, no sign-in, no ads, no analytics, no tracking. ALSO • A keyboard shortcut — Alt+Shift+S — turns interactive subtitles on and off. • Choose your own highlight colour and opacity, light or dark, and where the panel sits. • Have it look a word up the moment you select it, or only when you press Translate. • Thirteen subtitle languages — the major European ones, plus Japanese, Korean and Chinese. The grammar detail, meaning articles, plurals and verb tables, is richest for German. • Open source, MIT licensed. Requires Chrome 109 or later.