📝💬AGSoft Dialogue Keeper

The one trick it exists for

Run a story, a roleplay log, or a novel chapter through any machine translator and you get clean prose - and flat, lifeless dialogue. Every character suddenly talks like the same translation-service native speaker, and the names and turns of phrase you actually wanted kept in the original language are gone. 📝💬AGSoft Dialogue Keeper is a post-processor that fixes exactly that: give it the original text and the translation, and it finds every quoted or tagged line of dialogue and swaps the original wording back into the translated result. It's a find-and-replace surgeon, not a translator - no model, no API key, no GPU, runs in a millisecond.

It ships in the comfyui-AGSoft pack, which is built around a Russian text-and-video workflow (the AGSoft Translate node alongside it translates via free web services). If you're localizing text where dialogue should stay in the source language, this is the node the pack was really made for. If you only translate plain paragraphs, you don't need it.

How it works

Under the hood it's plain string surgery with regex - zero magic. It scans original_text for spans wrapped in your chosen template tags and/or quote-pair markers, scans translated_text with the same pattern, then replaces each translated span with the matching original one. When both sides have the same number of dialogues it just pairs them in order. When counts differ (the translator merged or dropped a line), it warns in the console and tries to align by marker type instead - decent, but imperfect.

The one design detail that looks like a bug but isn't: the template dropdown shows ‹d›....‹/d› with fancy single quotes instead of <d>....</d>. ComfyUI's dropdown eats angle brackets as HTML, so the author renders them HTML-safe. It means the same thing.

The inputs that matter

You only set two things for the basic case:

• original_text (required) - the source text before translation. The node hunts here for the dialogue spans to copy back.
• translated_text (required) - the translation. Everything stays as-is except the spans it recognizes as dialogue.

Then the marking scheme, which is where the real choices live:

• template - the dropdown. Default is ‹d›....‹/d› + markers, i.e. look for <d>...</d> tags and any quote pair. [Russian] variants tell you the intent: keep Russian dialogue in the English translation. markers only skips tags entirely; Custom tags uses your own tag_start/tag_end pair like [dialog] … [/dialog].
• markers - the list of quote-pair delimiters. Defaults to the full quote zoo (" ", « », “ ”, ‘ ’, „ “, …) so whatever curly quotes your source uses get caught. You can add multi-character markers like << >> (or <<|>> when you need an explicit open/close).

The single output is text - wire it into a Show Text node (this pack has 📝AGSoft Show Text and 👁️ AGSoft Show Any) or into whatever downstream step consumes your patched translation.

Install

The pack installs like any custom node, and this particular node has no extra dependencies - the whole thing is standard Python. The pack's requirements.txt only lists translators, and that's for AGSoft Translate, not this node.

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Art-xmaster/comfyui-AGSoft.git

Then restart ComfyUI. Easier: ComfyUI Manager → search "comfyui-AGSoft" → Install. You'll find the node under AGSoft → Text. Note the README is mostly Russian, and extended docs live on the author's Telegram channel - that's a heads-up, not a blocker; the tooltips in the node are bilingual.

Where people get burned

Tag mode assumes your translation step keeps the <d>...</d> tags intact. Free web translators often strip or mangle markup, so if you get an unchanged output plus a console warning about "No dialogues matched," that's usually why - check whether the tags survived in the translated text, or switch to markers only.

Quote mode has its own trap: if the translator "normalized" the quote characters (turned « » into " "), the original and translated spans no longer share a marker type and alignment falls back to fuzzy matching. Keep your markers list covering what the translation actually outputs, not just what your source uses.

If either input is empty, or nothing matches, or anything throws, the node fails safe and returns the translation unchanged - which is polite, but means a silent no-op is the symptom to watch for when it looks like the node "did nothing." Check the ComfyUI console for the [AGSoftDialogueKeeper] warning lines; they tell you exactly which branch it took.