Native script, Latin letters or English: which captions?

Picture a creator telling the camera: भाई, ये recipe सच में बहुत easy है. Spelt in Latin letters, that becomes 'bhai, ye recipe sach mein bahut easy hai'. Translated, it is close to 'Brother, this recipe really is very easy'.

Each version says much the same. What differs is who can follow it at the pace captions change, because a caption is on screen for roughly the time its words take to say aloud. Pick the version your audience reads without sounding the words out, not merely one they can decode.

Some viewers learned the language at school and read it daily even now: the newspaper, signboards in the market, messages in the family group. For them, the native script is quickest. Spelling in the script is far more settled than in Latin letters, which lets readers spot familiar words instantly. Devanagari serves both Hindi and Marathi; every remaining Indian language in Captionwale is written in a separate script.

The costs come in making the captions and in who they reach. You need fonts that contain the script, and a lot of caption fonts don't; picking caption fonts for Indian scripts explains what to look for. Native script also misses speakers of the language who were never taught its letters, many of them raised far from the language's home region. One more thing: check the form English words took inside sentences, and use one form for them throughout.

A lot of fluent Hindi speakers do their daily reading and typing in the Latin alphabet, and that includes their Hindi. For them, 'kya scene hai' on screen looks like every message they get, and romanised captions match that habit. Romanised text also serves those who grew up speaking the language at home without learning its script, as well as mixed audiences where only part of the crowd reads it.

Spelling is the weak point. There is no standard for romanised Hindi as people actually type it, so bahut also turns up as bohot, and nahi as nahin or nai. Latin letters also erase contrasts the script keeps: kam on screen could be कम (less) or काम (work), depending on who typed it. Go for consistency over correctness. Fix the spelling of the words you use again and again, like your sign-off or a regular guest's name, and keep to it in every video.

English is the one form that reaches people who don't speak the language at all: a viewer in a different state or country, or somebody in Delhi who follows a Tamil cooking channel.

It also loses the most. Wordplay, rhymes and jokes that rely on sound seldom survive. Hindi has three levels of 'you' in tu, tum and aap, running from intimate to polite, and English collapses them into one. The mixing of languages that gives Hinglish its feel is flattened, and viewers who understand the audio can find it jarring when the text says something different from what they hear.

Inside a sentence, timing gets fuzzier as well. English word order differs, so many translated words can't be pinned to an exact moment of speech. Captionwale anchors each translated sentence to the stretch of speech it came from: the caption starts as that sentence starts, and silences stay silent. Within the sentence, the English words are spread across its length. For timing trouble more generally, read captions out of sync.

The Prepare your media dialog has a Writing system setting; make your choice there, before you press Generate transcription. For the product side, see the Hinglish captions page. Each option goes its own way from the first step:

Burned-in captions carry a single writing system; in a mixed audience, somebody is always reading their second choice. Where Hindi speakers are split like this, starting with romanised captions is reasonable, and the comments can guide you from there: whichever script people use to write to you is likely the one they read with least effort.

Subtitle files take some pressure off where a platform allows more than one track. Since a transcription yields a single writing system, a second SRT or VTT, say English to sit beside native script, means exporting the first file and then running a fresh transcription in the other form. That fresh run spends minutes the same way the first one did.

Whichever form you choose, treat it as a draft. Transliteration makes guesses about spelling and translation makes guesses about meaning, and all three can get a name wrong. Before posting, have a speaker of the language read through the captions; then move on to correcting auto-captions.