Chinese Subtitle Generator

In most languages subtitles are an accessibility feature. In Chinese they are the default: nearly every video, film and drama carries them, because the spoken language has so many homophones that even native speakers rely on the text. That means the audience has high standards, and a subtitle with the wrong character in it is noticed the way a spelling error in a headline would be.

Choosing the character is the core of the work. A Mandarin syllable like shì can be written a dozen ways with a dozen meanings, and the correct one is decided by the words around it. The model reads the sentence to choose, which is the difference between a subtitle that reads naturally and one that reads as a string of plausible sounds. Where context does not settle it, the editor makes the fix a single click.

Then there is the split between Simplified and Traditional, which is not just a font. Vocabulary differs between the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong — 软件 versus 軟體, 视频 versus 影片 — and a good conversion handles the words, not only the strokes. Output whichever your audience reads, and export as UTF-8 so the characters survive every player and platform.