1 Overview
Parallel to my academic work, I founded BelugaSubs, a volunteer subtitle collective that grew into one of the most active localization groups in China. What began as manually coordinating a few translators around tech and cooking content turned into a 130-person remote organization, so I had to treat it as both a technical system and a production pipeline rather than a hobby fan group.
On the infrastructure side, I moved from ad-hoc Python scripts to a React + Node.js workstation and internal web drive that automate most of the grunt work. The system fetches source videos and subtitle files, applies BelugaSubs’ shared style templates, runs a forced-alignment step to sync text and audio, and packages episodes for different platforms. This let translators and reviewers focus on language and quality instead of file management, and made it possible to sustain a steady output of around 40 videos per week and more than 20,000 localized clips over several years.
On the operations side, I acted as Founder & Executive Director, introducing lightweight agile practices and Kanban-style boards so volunteers could see exactly what needed doing—intake, translation, timing, review, final QA—without constant micromanagement. I set up tiered QA roles, documented guidelines, and simple metrics around turnaround time and defect rates, which in turn made it feasible to launch a paid localization service for top-100 Bilibili creators under clear SLAs while keeping the community arm active. The group eventually attracted over 100,000 followers across platforms, and for many viewers our subtitles were their primary way of accessing high-quality tech and cooking content in Chinese.
2 Selected visuals
