Improve your translation quality

The AI that translates your dubs is strong, but it isn't a specialist in your brand. If a translation reads awkwardly, mistranslates a term, or ignores your preferred style, this article is the playbook for fixing it.

Before you dub — set yourself up to win

These three choices have the biggest impact on translation quality and are easy to get right in the dub creation modal:

1. Pick the right source language manually

Set the source language explicitly.

2. Set the correct speaker count

A video with two speakers but 1 speaker set will merge the second speaker's lines into the first — which scrambles both the transcript and the translation. Use 2 or Auto-detect when in doubt.

3. Apply a Translation Style

This is the biggest lever for brand-consistent translations. A Translation Style tells the AI:

Which terms to never translate (brand names, product names, trademarks, URLs).
Which custom translations to use — fixing wrong defaults like "Dashboard → Armaturenbrett" to "Dashboard → Übersicht".
How to pronounce tricky names (acronyms, domain terms) with phonetic hints.
Which tone and formality (professional, casual; formal vs. informal — critical for German, French, Japanese, etc.).

Set up a Translation Style per language pair you use regularly, then select it for each target language in the dub creation modal. See Translation Styles & Glossary for the full setup.

After the dub — the Advanced Editor

Once the dub is finished, open it and switch to the Advanced Editor to fix specific sentences without redoing the whole dub.

For each sequence you can edit:

Source text — correct a transcription mistake. When you save, the translation is regenerated automatically with paraphrase allowed.
Target text — rewrite the translation directly. When you save, the voice is re-synthesized on your exact wording — no paraphrase, no further translation.
Speaker — fix a speaker assignment the diarizer got wrong.

The preview button lets you listen to the updated sequence before you move on.

Common fixes that work:

A brand or product name translated literally → add it to your Translation Style's do-not-translate list, then fix the one sequence manually.
A technical term with no domestic equivalent → add a custom word pair to your Translation Style.
A cultural reference that doesn't land → rewrite the target text in Advanced Editor.
Passages feel too drawn out or too rushed → Open the segment in the Advanced Editor and shorten or lengthen/rephrase the target text to match the timing.
Strange noises or audio artifacts in a segment → Make a small edit to the target text and save to trigger a clean re-generation of the audio.

When the issue is tone, not word choice

If the translation is technically correct but sounds off — too formal for your brand, too stiff, too cold — the fix is on your Translation Style, not on individual sequences:

Adjust Tone (professional → casual, or the reverse).
Adjust Formality (informal → formal) for languages where it changes grammar (German du vs. Sie, French tu vs. vous, etc.).
Adjust Writing style (concise, technical, plain language).

Save the Translation Style. For the change to affect an existing dub, re-translate the relevant sequences in the Advanced Editor. There's currently no one-click "re-translate the whole dub with the updated style" — plan your Translation Style before dubbing long-form content.

When to redo the dub instead

Redoing from scratch is worth it when:

The source language was set wrong and most of the transcript is off.
The speaker count was set wrong and the diarization is nonsense.
You want to test a fundamentally different Translation Style on the same content.

Still not happy with the result?

If the translation keeps missing a specific term even after you've added it to your Translation Style, or if the output reads like a different register than you asked for, contact hello@dubly.ai with:

The dub title or URL
The source sentence and the target output
What you expected instead

That's the fastest way for us to check whether it's a setup issue or something we need to tune on our side.