How to check a subtitle translation against what was actually said
Give Vizard Agent the subtitle file and the video together. It transcribes the spoken original with timings and compares the two line by line, which is how a translation that "goes wrong halfway through" turns out to be one missing line pushing every subsequent line onto the wrong speech.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Describe the symptom rather than diagnosing it yourself. "The timings are out" and "a line is missing" look identical when you're watching the film, and they need opposite fixes, so let Vizard Agent work out which one you have. Name the spoken language, the file's language and the encoding your player needs.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
A drift that starts partway through is usually a structural fault, not a timing problem. So instead of correcting lines one at a time, Vizard Agent compares the order of the translated lines against a timed transcript and looks for the point where the two first diverge. In the session behind this article it:
- Read a Czech subtitle file for a Russian-language film, checked its encoding and character order, and transcribed the spoken Russian with timings as the reference.
- Cut out a short audio extract where a passage of verse was unclear and listened to it on its own, and enlarged the frames carrying the original on-screen subtitles to read them verse by verse.
- Wrote a corrected file with a faithful translation and readable line lengths, then compared the number and order of translated lines against the transcript.
- Narrowed down, section by section, the point where the two orders first diverged, found a missing line earlier in the dialogue, and restored it with its timing.
- Re-verified the whole ordering, checked the Czech grammar, split an over-long question back into two timed subtitles, and confirmed the encoding.
When does this not work well?
Some files can't be checked this way. If the audio is too noisy to transcribe, several people talk over each other throughout, or the translation is a deliberately loose adaptation rather than a rendering of the dialogue, a line-by-line comparison produces noise rather than findings. Songs and verse throughout slow every line down, and a file with no timings has nothing to align against.
Common questions
Do I need to understand the spoken language? No. Vizard Agent transcribes it and shows you what was actually said, line by line.
What if the timings really are out? Then Vizard Agent says so, and re-times the file against the transcript.
Will it rewrite the whole translation? Only where it is wrong. Vizard Agent keeps what the translator got right.