Field notes
Welcome to the nerd zone! In our field notes we share how we build Reelang, let you peek inside the factory to see how the sausage is made, and get into how we use technology under the hood with our fellow geeks. Got feedback or ideas? Head over to our open roadmap and hash them out with us.
Just here to learn a language with videos, not the technical details of how we make it happen? Watch a video in the language you're learning.
August 4, 2026
In l10n, an LLM with context beats a human translator without it
If you are a small team shipping in more than one language, you can get native-quality localization out of AI models today. Actually good, the kind that survives a native speaker reading it closely. What decides the outcome is not which model you pick, but the context that reaches whoever is translating, whether that's a model or a human. The diligence of models can have an advantage over a professional you would hire otherwise.
August 3, 2026
Portuguese speaks two ways
Brazilian and European Portuguese share a name and five centuries of drifting apart. A look at diglossia in Portuguese, the words that mean two different things depending which coast you're on, and what it takes to measure "common" once you split it.
July 22, 2026
How to build a Simple English version of your website with LLMs and word-frequency data
If your site has a global audience, some of your readers are not fluent in the language you wrote it in. A proper localized site is the best answer, but there is always a long tail of languages you can't translate and maintain. Here is how we build a plain, Simple English version instead: quickly, with reasoning LLMs, and grounded in real word-frequency data so it's actually readable.
July 8, 2026
Hiding the words so you can hear them (blurring out burned-in subtitles for language learning)
Half the videos worth learning from arrive with subtitles stamped right into the picture. Great for scrolling with the sound off, quietly bad for your ears. Reading a line before you've heard it isn't the same as understanding the audio. So we built a way to find those baked-in subtitles and blur them out, and paired it with our own tappable subtitle layer that you actually learn from. Here's the thinking, and, in plain terms, what it takes.
July 1, 2026
How we find videos you can almost understand
Nobody tags a YouTube clip "good for a high-A2 learner of Portuguese." So we built a pipeline that goes looking, in every language, and grades each video by ear before it ever reaches you. Here's roughly how it works.
June 27, 2026
Why an accurate video transcript is the foundation of Reelang, and why we run it on Deepgram
Almost everything clever Reelang does, the smart subtitles that surface the most common words, the difficulty scoring, the learner insights, rests on one plain thing: knowing exactly what was said, and when. That is a speech-to-text problem, and it is the part of our stack we worry about least. Why we run it on Deepgram, which models we use per language, and how the word timing drives everything.