#Translate

Captions transcribe your speech live and translate it in real time, so viewers can read along in another language. Live transcription plus translation is one of 4thRock's flagship features: you speak, and your audience sees running captions in the language they understand. See How It Works for where captions sit in the pipeline.

#What captions do

As you stream, your audio is transcribed and translated continuously. The result appears as captions in your overlay: the source text on top, with the translation shown as an italic sub-line below it. A language badge marks the detected source language. Captions can also be relayed into your chat so viewers who are not watching the overlay still get the gist.

#Caption modes

Switch caption behavior with the captions_mode control. There are three modes:

• Realtime - live, running captions that update as you speak. This is the lowest-latency mode and is on by default.
• Summary - periodic, AI-summarized captions instead of a continuous stream. Summary captions are styled distinctly on the overlay and stay up a little longer, which keeps things readable during fast or dense talking.
• Off - captions are turned off.

Changing the mode takes effect live. You do not need to restart your session.

#Always on: skip same language

Captions never redundantly "translate" text that is already in the target language. This skip-same-language behavior is permanent and is not a setting. If you are already speaking the language your viewers read, captions simply show your words without a pointless same-language pass.

#Music filtering

Captions can filter out music and lyrics so songs are not transcribed as if they were speech. This is controlled by the Filter music setting, which is on by default. Leave it on if you react to music and do not want lyrics captioned. Turn it off if you regularly talk over music and want your speech to keep translating, since the filter cannot perfectly separate sung lyrics from talking. While music is filtered, the overlay shows a small note marker instead of a translated lyric.

#Optional behaviors

A few related controls let you tune captions further:

• Sanitize - optionally clean up profanity in the captioned output.
• Bidirectional - for two-language conversations, caption and translate both directions so two speakers can follow each other.

Use these only if your stream needs them. The defaults work well for a single host translating into one viewer language.

#Placement in Appearance

Captions render in the overlay, where you position and style them like any other widget. You can place the caption block at the top or bottom, set the font and colors, and control how many lines show at once. See Appearance for adding the captions layer and arranging it with your scene.