Edgespeak Translate

EdgeSpeak Translate

Translate a timed transcript into another language. This skill is agent-driven: you write the translations. There is no edgespeak-cli translate, no translation API, no external MT service — the quality comes from your own language ability plus the rules below. That also keeps the whole pipeline local: the audio was transcribed on-device, and the text should not be shipped to a cloud translator either.

It fits between the other skills: edgespeak-transcribe / edgespeak-align produce the timed source, this skill adds the target language, and edgespeak-broadcast can speak the result as a dub.

Inputs to confirm

• Source transcript — an EdgeSpeak JSON (segments[] with start / end / text, optionally words[]) or an .srt. A plain wall of text has no timing; run edgespeak-segment on it first if per-sentence output is wanted.
• Target language.
• Output shape — translation-only SRT, bilingual SRT (source line + target line), or JSON with a translation field per segment (best when anything downstream needs the timings).
• Will it be spoken? If the translation feeds edgespeak-broadcast for dubbing, the length budget below is a hard constraint, not a preference. Ask this before translating — it changes every line.

Invariants

These hold for every segment. A violation means the output no longer matches the audio.

One source segment → one target segment. Everything downstream (SRT cues, karaoke, dub alignment) indexes on that.

Non-speech segments — music, lyrics, applause, noise — still need a non-empty translation: copy the source text verbatim rather than translating or leaving it blank, so the 1:1 count holds.

How to do it

1. Read the source and count segments. Report the count before starting.
2. Skim ~5 segments spread across the file and note, in a few lines you keep in front of you while translating: domain, register (formal/casual, per speaker if known), recurring terms, and the tokens to keep verbatim (brands, products, people, acronyms). This term list is what makes chunk 7 consistent with chunk 1.
3. Translate in chunks of ~30 segments. Quality degrades on longer runs. Give each chunk the term list plus the last couple of segments before it and the first couple after it as context only, not to translate.
4. Parallelize when it's long. ≥5 chunks → dispatch one subagent per chunk in a single message, each returning an {id: translation} map. Fewer → do it inline. Never bundle more than ~30 segments into one dispatch.
5. Merge, then run the checker (below) instead of eyeballing it. Counting 600 segments by hand is exactly the check that gets skipped.
6. Write the output in the requested shape. Do not silently overwrite an existing file at the target path: if it already exists and the user did not explicitly ask to overwrite or regenerate it, confirm first (or agree on a different path); when you cannot ask, write to a new non-conflicting path and say so in your answer.

Checking the result

One bundled script, zero dependencies, Node 18+. It re-reads both files and proves the mechanical parts of the rules above:

node <skill-dir>/scripts/check-translation.mjs \
    --translated out.json --source transcript.json --lang zh

--translated is the only required flag; --source unlocks the invariant checks (they need something to compare against), and --lang selects the character budget. Exit codes: 0 clean · 1 WARN · 2 FAIL.

A FAIL means the output no longer lines up with the audio — fix the segment and re-run. A WARN is a judgement call: fix it, or tell the user why it stands. Do not edit the file to silence a check you haven't understood, and do not report success on a non-zero exit.

A SKIP is not a pass. The run ends with No findings, but not fully checked instead of Clean, and it still exits 0 — relay that distinction to the user rather than calling the output verified. Language codes are normalized before lookup, so zh-CN, zh_CN, and ZH all resolve to zh.

The checker reads transcript JSON, not SRT — one more reason to keep JSON as the master artifact and generate SRT from it. Its own tests run with node --test "<skill-dir>/scripts/*.test.mjs".

Translation rules

The rules that matter most, roughly in order of how often they get broken.

Rewrite, don't word-substitute. The line should read like a native speaker wrote it, not like it was mapped token by token.

Punctuation parity — never inject punctuation the source lacks. Forbidden when the corresponding source has none: —— / — / --, （…） / (…), […] / 【…】. An em-dash forces a hard pause and TTS reads parentheses aloud as asides; both deform delivery even in plain subtitles. Rewrite the connector instead, using what the source already implies:

• I think it's nextgen because these things go crazy.
  • ✗ 我觉得那就是下一代打法——这些东西就是会疯传。
  • ✓ 我觉得那就是下一代打法，因为这些东西就是会疯传。
• the demultiplexer or demux.
  • ✗ 解复用器（也叫 demux）。
  • ✓ 解复用器，也叫 demux。

Beyond "don't insert": mirror the count and order of interior punctuation, picking the natural target mark from the same class (. ! ? … ↔ 。！？…; , ; : ↔ ，、；：). Hi, friend. → 你好，朋友。, not 朋友你好。 — dropping a comma for style silently breaks bilingual cue splitting.

One term, one translation. When a term admits several defensible renderings, decide once and reuse it everywhere. Never ship both side by side — / gets read aloud as "斜杠" and the audience hears your indecision:

• ✗ 参差不齐的智能 / 锯齿状智能 ✗ 参差不齐 ✓ 参差不齐的智能

Localize countries, places, and nationalities; keep proper nouns. Default is to translate these with the standard exonym — they are ordinary vocabulary, not brand names. Leaving them in English next to translated text reads as half-machine-translated, and TTS pronounces them with the wrong phonemes.

• Countries / regions: China → 中国 · Russia → 俄罗斯 · America → 美国 · Europe → 欧洲 · EU → 欧盟 · Middle East → 中东
• Nationalities and languages, singular and plural: Chinese → 中国人 / 中文 · Americans → 美国人
• Cities and metonyms: Moscow → 莫斯科 · San Francisco → 旧金山 · Silicon Valley → 硅谷 · Wall Street → 华尔街 · Hollywood → 好莱坞

Keep the English only when the source uses it as the proper noun of an organization or publication — "China Mobile" the company, "Wall Street Journal" the newspaper. The same principle applies to any target language with established exonyms.

Add nothing the source didn't say. No acronyms, no expansions, no parenthetical glosses. Treat the source as a voice script and render only what was spoken:

• People call it model view controller. → ✓ 大家叫它模型视图控制器。 ✗ 大家叫它 MVC（模型-视图-控制器）。

Never annotate suspected ASR errors. Cloud Code（应为 Claude Code） gets read aloud verbatim. If another segment in the same transcript clearly shows the right name, silently use the canonical form in both. If it isn't obvious, translate as-is and mention it to the user separately.

Numbers and units: one writing system per token. 30% or 百分之三十, never 三十%; 50 GB, never 五十G B. Mixed forms break text normalizers and get read out character by character. Prefer Arabic digits plus the unit, and use the fully spelled-out form only when the source itself spelled the number out.

Enumerated reads keep their token count. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 → 1、2、3、4、5、6、7, not 1 到 7 — the duration budget assumes each token was spoken.

Prune demonstratives for zh / ja / ko. English leans on this / that / these / the as syntactic scaffolding; CJK drops them routinely. Default to deleting, and keep only for real deixis ("look at this slide") or explicit contrast:

• These models are getting wild. → ✓ 模型越来越离谱了。 ✗ 这些模型变得越来越疯狂。

Does not apply to European-language targets, which keep their demonstratives.

Preserve voice and force. Casual stays casual, precise stays precise, questions stay questions, emphasis stays emphatic. Keep fillers only when they carry meaning.

Use the target language's own punctuation convention — full-width ，。？！：； for zh / ja / ko — and stay consistent across every chunk of the same transcript.

Length budget (subtitles, and mandatory for dubbing)

Each segment has a fixed duration. A translation that overruns it either scrolls past the viewer or, when synthesized, gets compressed into audible distortion.

Hard ceiling — max_chars = (end - start) × CPS, never exceeded:

Translating into a language not in that table (Italian, Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese, Polish …) is fine — everything else in this skill applies unchanged, and the checker still verifies segment count, invariants, and punctuation. Only the budget check goes away, and it reports itself as SKIP. Do not invent a CPS number for the missing language: a fabricated ceiling silently passes overlong lines or forces pointless compression, which is worse than an honest gap. Instead judge length by eye against the source duration, keeping the same relative density the table implies — a syllable-dense language sits nearer zh, a word-length-heavy one nearer de — and tell the user the budget was not machine-checked.

Ideal length — aim for (end - start) × source_cps × ratio, which preserves the speaker's delivery density: en→zh 0.35 · ja/ko 0.51 · ru 0.93 · hi/es/pt/nl 0.98 · de 1.05 · fr 1.10.

Counting characters in a zh / ja / ko line: brand names and acronyms that stay in Latin script do not cost one budget unit per letter — Claude speaks in roughly the time of two Chinese characters, and the spaces around it are not spoken at all. Count a run of Latin letters as ceil(letters / 3) units, ignore spaces, and count everything else per character. Latin-script targets count every character as-is. Do not shorten a line that only looks long because it carries an untranslated product name.

The ceiling wins over the ideal. When they conflict, compress the phrasing — drop implied subjects, pick shorter synonyms, collapse subordinate clauses. Never merge or split segments to solve a budget problem. Both rules are waived for segments under ~1.5 s or under ~20 source characters. If a segment simply cannot fit, translate it as tightly as you can and flag it to the user rather than silently overrunning.

Optional refinement pass

When the user asks for higher quality (a flagship video, a first run into a new language), do a second pass over the merged result: re-read each chunk against the source and check four axes — accuracy, naturalness, terminology consistency, voice preservation — and rewrite translation in place where one fails. Report what changed and anything you flagged but left alone. Skip this pass for drafts and bulk backfills; it roughly doubles the cost.

Boundaries / gotchas (read this)

• There is no CLI for this. Don't invent edgespeak-cli translate and don't shell out to an online translation service — the point is that the text stays on the machine, and a fabricated command fails loudly in front of the user.
• Word timings are source-language. Translating does not re-time anything: words[] still describes the original audio. For target-language word timing, synthesize the translation with edgespeak-broadcast, then run edgespeak-align on that audio.
• Segment count is the contract. If you find yourself wanting to merge two cues because the translation reads better, don't — fix the phrasing instead.
• Long transcripts are the normal case. A 60-minute talk is ~600 segments, ~20 chunks. Chunk and parallelize rather than trying to hold it all in one pass, and never quietly translate only the first N segments — if you have to stop early, say exactly where you stopped.
• The checker needs Node 18+, but nothing else — no EdgeSpeak runtime, no license. If Node is missing, say the verification did not run rather than claiming the output is clean.