Bilingual Caption Doctor

Arabic, English and invisible direction controls

Arabic and English can share a caption while punctuation and numbers appear in an unexpected place. A cue such as “السعر: USD 25” contains both writing directions. Reversing the stored string is not a reliable repair: letters, digits and punctuation do not all follow the same directional behavior.

Inspect the stored text first

The bilingual and isolate fixtures contain original Arabic/English examples. The isolate example places U+2066 before USD 25 and U+2069 after it. Caption Doctor identifies those code points and preserves them. Their presence is an observation, not proof of damage.

  1. Import your UTF-8 SRT or WebVTT file.
  2. Look for the mixed-direction and direction-control observations.
  3. Compare the original and proposed text. A sequence repair should change cue numbers, not Arabic letters or controls.
  4. Export a new file and inspect punctuation, currency and speaker names in the intended editor.

What the preview tells you

The browser preview isolates each caption's direction from surrounding interface text. It cannot certify Premiere or another editor's font, shaping, line wrapping or caption settings. A direction override such as U+202E deserves particular attention because it can reorder the display of text. Caption Doctor reports it; it does not silently remove it.

For a real acceptance check, compare the isolate and override fixture exports in your editor. Keep the original file as your reference. This tool does not translate, transcribe or automatically repair the linguistic content of a caption.

Tested examples: bilingual,isolate,rlm,alm,override. Original synthetic fixtures maintained with the tool.