How to get subtitles written the way the characters would speak
Tell Vizard Agent to adapt the dialogue rather than translate it, and say how each character speaks. A line-for-line rendering is accurate and unwatchable: teenagers end up sounding like a legal notice, and the half-finished sentences that carry the performance disappear into tidy grammar.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Write the rules you'd give a human adapter, and say who's young, who's formal and who's deliberately rude. Terms like "colloquial", "do not translate word for word" and "it has to sound natural spoken aloud" are exactly the instructions a dubbing studio gives, and they work here for the same reason.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
The writing happens against the timings rather than before them. Each line has a known number of seconds, so the adaptation is constrained the way a real dub script is, and a line that can't be said in the time is rewritten rather than squeezed. Vizard Agent then checks the alignment against the transcript. In the session behind this article it:
- Sampled an anime clip, transcribed the dialogue with word timings and reviewed the visuals to see who was speaking and how they behaved.
- Wrote the timed French adaptation line by line against those timings, and uploaded the script so it could be checked separately from the video.
- Verified the source transcript's timings, built the subtitle track and found a line offset where the adaptation and the transcript had drifted apart.
- Regenerated the track with all thirty-four segments correctly aligned.
- Rendered a short sample first to check the subtitles were readable, then encoded the full video with them burnt in.
- Checked the contact sheet, the waveform and the stream durations before delivery.
When does this not work well?
Some material resists adaptation. Wordplay that depends on the original language, jokes built on honorifics, or dialogue where the humour is the grammar itself will lose something, and Vizard Agent will tell you what it traded rather than quietly flattening it. Songs and very fast overlapping dialogue are hard too.
Common questions
Is this a dub or subtitles? Either. Tell Vizard Agent which, because line lengths differ between them.
Can it keep honorifics? Yes. Name the ones to keep and Vizard Agent leaves each of them untranslated.
Can I see the script before the video? Yes, and it's the sensible order. Vizard Agent uploads the script separately.