Generate subtitles for your Afrikaans videos

About Afrikaans transcription

Afrikaans (Afrikaans) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in South Africa and Namibia. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Afrikaans, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

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 a Afrikaans subtitle file looks like

Four lines as they come out of the exported SRT, in the Latin alphabet with the timings taken from the speech itself.

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
Kan julle my duidelik hoor?

Line length in Afrikaans

Afrikaans welds nouns together into single long words, so a Afrikaans subtitle line runs visually wider than its word count suggests.

Shorter subtitle blocks read better as a result, and splitting one across two events costs nothing — the timings come from the speech either way.

What people caption in Afrikaans

The Afrikaans material that comes through most often is news, religious content, interviews and educational video. All of it works the same way — upload the file, check the transcript, export the subtitle track.

Getting a better Afrikaans transcript

• Set the language to Afrikaans rather than leaving detection on, particularly for clips under a minute where there is little audio to judge from.
• Upload the highest-quality audio you have; compression artefacts cost more accuracy than most people expect.
• Check proper nouns, place names and numbers first — recognition errors concentrate there.
• Read the transcript before exporting. Afrikaans subtitles are editable up until you download them.

Afrikaans subtitles in another language

The same Afrikaans audio can produce subtitles in any of the 76 supported languages instead of in Afrikaans itself. English is the most common target, but every pair works, and the translated file keeps the original timings so it drops onto the same video unchanged.