Most localization managers evaluating AI dubbing hit the same wall: the demo is impressive, but nobody can explain what happens between "upload your video" and "download your dub." Where does the glossary go? Who fixes a mistranslated line without regenerating the whole file? What happens to the music bed? If the answers are vague, the tool becomes another black box you have to QA from scratch on every project.
This article follows a single prerecorded asset, say, a 40-minute documentary episode, through Ollang's AI dubbing workflow, stage by stage, so you can map each step against your own pipeline and see where the control points sit. Every product claim below traces to Ollang's own documentation and published materials; where public documentation is ambiguous, that is noted rather than glossed over.
Preparing Media, Scripts and Supporting Assets for the AI Dubbing Workflow
The workflow starts with an order. Ollang accepts the source asset in several forms:
- Video files, uploaded directly. Ollang's documentation lists MP4 among supported formats and permits direct video uploads up to 30 GB, enough headroom for broadcast-length mezzanine files without pre-compression.
- Audio files, with MP3 explicitly listed and a documented 100 MB limit for audio and document uploads.
- URLs, entered through the dashboard instead of uploading a file. Ollang also documents workflows connecting YouTube and Vimeo through its MCP integrations, which matters if your source content already lives on those platforms.
- A TXT script with no video at all, feeding a text-to-speech-first dubbing flow. This is useful when the localized script is finalized before picture, or when you are producing audio-only deliverables.
The documentation describes format support as "MP4, MP3 … and more" without publishing an exhaustive codec and container list, so confirm your specific mezzanine specs before committing a large catalog.
Just as important as the media are the supporting assets. Ollang's order model explicitly includes source subtitle files, background/accompaniment audio, guidelines, character lists and glossaries. For a localization manager, this is the difference between an AI tool and a workflow:
- Glossaries and terminology memories keep product names, character names and domain terms consistent across the translation stage, rather than relying on post-hoc find-and-replace.
- Project guidelines carry your style rules, register, formality, treatment of on-screen references, into the translation step the same way a style guide would brief a human linguist.
- Character lists give the pipeline the cast structure of the content, which feeds directly into speaker handling downstream.
- A separate accompaniment track, if you have M&E stems, can be supplied so dialogue processing never touches your music and effects bed.
For our documentary episode, the order at this point contains the video, an existing source-language SRT, a terminology glossary, a two-page style guideline and a character list covering the narrator and four interview subjects. If you are localizing into several markets, the API can create separate orders per target language from the same source assets.
Transcribing and Localizing the Dialogue
If no usable source transcript exists, Ollang's AI processing transcribes the source audio into text. Notably, the platform orchestrates multiple speech-to-text providers rather than binding you to one engine, the same provider-orchestration approach applies to translation and text-to-speech. For a manager who has watched one vendor's ASR struggle with a particular accent or domain, provider flexibility inside a single platform is a practical hedge.
Where the source audio is noisy or dialogue sits under music, audio preparation matters. Ollang's asset model recognizes a source accompaniment track and can create a processed background track, separating dialogue from the underlying audio bed. A technology partner has described Ollang isolating vocals and cleaning background noise ahead of transcription and dubbing; treat that operational description as partner-reported rather than an Ollang specification, but the vocals/accompaniment separation itself is directly documented in the order model.
Translation then runs against the localized assets you supplied. Ollang supports model and provider selection, custom instructions, terminology memories, glossaries and project-level guidelines at this stage. Concretely: the glossary you attached at ingestion constrains how the interview subjects' organization names are rendered, and the guideline document governs register. This is the stage where most generic dubbing tools force you to fix terminology after synthesis; here it is handled before a single line of audio is generated.
