Tamil education channel

The Challenge

The channel explains engineering concepts in Tamil, and engineering vocabulary does not translate. A single sentence carries Tamil grammar around English terms — concept, frequency, resistance — said in a Tamil accent. That is precisely the seam where an English-first model gives up: it hears the English words as mangled English and the Tamil as noise.

The result was captions that had to be rewritten rather than corrected, so most of the back catalogue simply went out without them — on a platform where a large share of viewers watch with the sound off.

Our Strategy

The language is detected before transcription starts, and Tamil comes back in தமிழ் rather than as a romanized approximation someone has to convert by hand. English technical terms stay in Latin script inside the Tamil line, which is how the words are written down anywhere else.

Each clip can be output three ways from the one transcript — native script, Romanized, or an English translation — so the same lecture serves the Tamil-first audience and the search traffic arriving in English.

A single caption template was applied across the archive rather than per video, which is what made recaptioning the back catalogue a job of days rather than months.

The Results

The archive got captions it never had.

Lectures that had gone out bare now carry Tamil captions in native script with their English terms intact, from one pass per clip rather than a rewrite.