Pick the script your audience reads fastest
Most people who speak Hinglish on camera switch languages mid-sentence without thinking about it. The captions have to make a decision the speaker never made: which script to write it in. Devanagari is precise and respects the Hindi, but many viewers who message in Hinglish every day read Roman script faster, because that is how they type.
Look at your comments and messages. If your audience writes “kal milte hain” rather than “कल मिलते हैं”, Roman captions will feel native to them. If your content is aimed at a Hindi-first audience, or the clip is poetry, news or anything where exact wording matters, Devanagari may be the clearer choice. In Gradian you choose this before transcribing, so decide once per series and stay consistent.
Settle on spellings and keep them
Romanised Hindi has no single official spelling. “Hai”, “hain” and “he” can all appear in the same comment section. That freedom becomes a problem when one clip spells a word three ways. Viewers notice the inconsistency even if they cannot say why a caption feels messy.
Keep a short list of the words you say often: recurring phrases, names of people, places and products. Decide how each is spelled, then check for them in every transcript. Long vowels are the usual trouble spots: “shaadi” versus “shadi”, “yaar” versus “yar”. Pick the version that is easiest to read at speed, not the one that is most phonetically exact.
Leave English words in English
Code-switched speech is full of English: “weekend”, “lighting”, “actually”, “location”. Write those words the way they are normally spelled in English. Transliterating them into unusual Roman spellings makes the viewer stop and decode something they already know.
The same goes for brand names and technical terms. If the speaker says a product name, spell it the way the product spells itself. When a transcript gets one of these wrong, fix it before anything else, because a misspelled name is the error people notice first.
Read it once as a stranger would
Hinglish leans on tone. “Haan haan, bilkul” can be agreement or sarcasm depending on how it is said. Captions cannot carry the voice, so read the finished transcript with the sound off and ask whether the meaning survives. Sometimes an ellipsis, a question mark or a line break in the right place restores what the tone was doing.
Finally, check that emphasis lands on the word that carries the point. A punch-word preset is a useful tool for this, but only if the punch lands on the right word. Move it until the caption reads the way it was actually said.
Try these ideas in Studio.
Try it in Gradian ↗