Generate Afrikaans subtitles for your English videos

Line length in Afrikaans

Afrikaans welds nouns together into single long words, so a sentence that fitted comfortably as English can overflow the same subtitle box once translated. The word count barely moves; the character count does.

Shorter blocks are the fix. Splitting a long line across two subtitle events costs nothing — the timings come from the original speech either way and stay in sync.

How English audio becomes Afrikaans subtitles

Audio in English (English) is transcribed first, then translated into Afrikaans (Afrikaans). Because the translation runs on the transcript rather than on the audio, the Afrikaans subtitle file keeps the timings of the original English speech — each line appears at the moment it was actually said.

Why translate English video into Afrikaans

English is spoken principally in worldwide; Afrikaans in South Africa and Namibia. A Afrikaans subtitle track is what lets one recording reach both audiences without re-recording, re-editing or dubbing it.

Because subtitles are a separate file rather than part of the picture, you can attach several language tracks to the same video and let viewers pick.

About the English audio

English has a wider spread of accents than any other language here, and the gap between spelling and pronunciation means recognition leans on context rather than sound alone. Names and technical terms are where errors concentrate, because those are exactly the words context cannot predict.

About the Afrikaans subtitles

Afrikaans grew out of Dutch and stayed close enough to it that automatic detection between the two is unreliable on short clips. Its grammar requires a second negative at the end of a negated sentence, so a transcript ending in a repeated 'nie' is correct rather than a stutter. South African speech also switches into English mid-sentence routinely, and that is transcribed as spoken.

What an English to Afrikaans subtitle file looks like

Four lines of English speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the English speaker's — translation does not move them, which is why the file drops onto the original video unchanged.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
Goeiemôre almal.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Dankie aan almal dat julle gekom het.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Kom ons begin met die eerste vraag.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Tot volgende keer.

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in English may need loosening to read well in Afrikaans.
• Line width, since Afrikaans packs the same sentence into longer words than English does.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.