What is code-switching?
Code-switching is moving between two languages in the same conversation, often in the same sentence. Hinglish (Hindi and English), Kanglish (Kannada and English), Tanglish (Tamil and English) and Manglish (Malayalam and English) are everyday examples. Across India, it's how many people talk at home, at work and on camera.
Why it's hard to caption
Many speech recognition setups expect one language at a time. When the language changes mid-sentence, a tool expecting only English or only Hindi can mishear or drop the other language's words. The result is captions that are wrong exactly where the speaker switched.
There's a second problem: even with a perfect transcript, a caption that mixes two scripts in one line is hard to read quickly on a phone.
Choosing a caption language
Decide who's reading, then caption the whole video in one language:
- English captions reach the widest audience, including viewers who don't read your Indian language.
- Captions in the Indian language, such as Hindi in Devanagari or Kannada in Kannada script, speak directly to your home audience.
Either way, the parts spoken in the other language need translating, so the whole caption track reads in one language.
How Veda handles it
Veda transcribes speech that switches between an Indian language and English with speech recognition built for Indian languages. You pick one caption language per video, English or one of 11 Indian languages, and every caption is written in it, translated where the speech differs. Captions are burned in, up to six words a line, and the audio is never dubbed.
See the full list on subtitles in 12 languages, or jump to Hindi, Kannada or Tamil.
Tips for creators who switch languages
- Be consistent per channel. If your Instagram audience reads Hindi, caption in Hindi every time.
- Watch clips before posting, especially for names and technical terms that are the same in both languages.
- Don't change how you talk. Your audience follows you because of how you speak; the captions should fit that, not the other way round.