Generate Arabic subtitles for your Turkish videos

Reading Arabic subtitles right to left

Arabic runs right to left while Turkish runs left to right, so the exported file reads in the opposite direction from the audio you uploaded. Subtitle formats carry that correctly and mainstream players render it without configuration.

Mixed passages — a Latin-script brand name or number inside a right-to-left line — are where rendering most often looks wrong, and they are worth checking in the player you actually publish to rather than in a text editor.

How Turkish audio becomes Arabic subtitles

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

From the Latin alphabet to the Arabic script

Turkish is written in the Latin alphabet and Arabic in the Arabic script, so the exported file uses a different writing system from the audio that produced it. The subtitle formats handle that — SRT and VTT are plain text and carry any script — but the font in whatever plays the file has to cover it.

This is the most common reason a Arabic subtitle track looks correct in an editor and shows boxes or blanks on a device. Test on the target platform before you publish a batch.

Why translate Turkish video into Arabic

Turkish is spoken principally in Turkey and Cyprus; Arabic in North Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. A Arabic 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 Turkish audio

Turkish is agglutinative: a single word can carry what English needs a clause for, so word counts are low and individual words are long. Spelling is highly regular, which makes it transcribe cleanly.

About the Arabic subtitles

The gap between Modern Standard Arabic and the regional dialects is the thing to plan around: broadcast news is close to the standard, while everyday Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine and Maghrebi speech diverge from it considerably. Standard-register material transcribes markedly better than heavy dialect.

What a Turkish to Arabic subtitle file looks like

Four lines of Turkish speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the Turkish 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
لنبدأ بالسؤال الأول.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
سأشارك التفاصيل بعد قليل.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
اكتبوا أسئلتكم في الأسفل.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
أراكم في المرة القادمة.

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in Turkish may need loosening to read well in Arabic.
• That the Arabic script renders in your player, not just in the editor you exported from.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.