Vietnamese subtitle generator

So a short or noisy stretch is never written in another language. When the language is guessed, a few unclear seconds can go astray, and a subtitle in the wrong language stops viewers short. Set to Vietnamese, every syllable is written as Vietnamese.

For a video that switches between Vietnamese and English for long stretches, the main subtitle generator works better, as it detects the language of each stretch by itself.

Two things. Because every space is a possible break, a line can fall between the syllables of one word, as “quảng / trường” and “thực / sự” did in our test. And where a full stop is missing, two sentences can share a subtitle.

Both are quick fixes in a text editor: move the syllable to the other line, or add the missing full stop before the capital that opens the next sentence. In our test, 29 of 90 subtitles ended on a sentence end, fewer than in most languages, because full stops were sparser.

Netflix’s Vietnamese style guide writes decimals with a comma (“2,5 triệu người”), thousands with a full stop (“1.000 đồng”) and one to ten in words, and starts each of two speakers’ lines with a hyphen and a space.

Our test wrote figures as digits, such as “15m” and “tháng 8 năm 2011”. The guide’s limits match this page’s, 42 characters a line and 17 a second; speaker hyphens are yours to add, since the web generator writes the words alone.

Vietnamese is among the languages NoteOwl understands on a Mac. It transcribes Vietnamese recordings there with unlimited transcription, labels each speaker and saves SRT subtitles with their names. For a transcript rather than subtitles, use Vietnamese audio to text.