How to translate subtitles into a language that needs to know who is speaking
Give Vizard Agent the film as well as the subtitle file. English carries no grammatical gender and one form of "you", so a translation into Czech, Polish or Russian has to decide both. The only place that information exists is on screen, in who is speaking to whom.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Name the target language and the specific problems. A translator told to watch for gender agreement behaves differently from one told to translate accurately, because "accurately" does not describe a choice the source text never made. If you have two subtitle files, send both, and say what encoding your audience's player needs.
Compare the Slovak and English subtitles against the video, then make a Czech version. Check the gendered forms match who is actually speaking, and keep the formal and informal address consistent.
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
It translates in context, then audits the decisions separately. Passing neighbouring lines together keeps the gender and continuity that a line-by-line pass throws away. Then the finished file is read for the two things machine translation gets wrong. Two independent versions are the cheapest way to find confidently wrong lines, because that's where they disagree. In the session behind this article it:
- Compared the Slovak and English files for coverage and timing: the Slovak was the better guide to gender and formality, the English the more complete text.
- Transcribed the film's spoken dialogue as an independent check on both files.
- Built one Czech version from the English and a second from the Slovak, and compared them where they disagreed.
- Went back through for formality, checking how characters address each other in the Slovak, searched for contradictions in formal and informal address, and checked the long dialogue stretches where wrong gendered forms cluster.
- Saved in the requested Central European encoding, flagging any character that codepage could not hold rather than dropping it.
When does this not work well?
When the film doesn't make the relationship clear. If two characters' formality shifts during the story, where it shifts is an interpretation, not a fact, and Vizard Agent flags the stretch rather than picking silently. A voice off camera can leave the gender undetermined, and lines in a third language have to be found and translated on their own.
Common questions
Do you need the video, or just the file? The video. Vizard Agent cannot tell who is speaking from the text alone.
What if a speaker is never shown? Vizard Agent flags it rather than guessing, and you decide.
Can I see it on screen before I accept it? Yes. Vizard Agent renders short burnt-in samples for that.