Generate subtitles for your Arabic videos

About Arabic transcription

Arabic (العربية) is written in the Arabic script and spoken principally in North Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Arabic, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file. The script runs right to left, which subtitle files carry correctly and mainstream players render without extra setup.

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 people caption in Arabic

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

Getting a better Arabic transcript

• Set the language to Arabic 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. Arabic subtitles are editable up until you download them.

Arabic subtitles in another language

The same Arabic audio can produce subtitles in any of the 76 supported languages instead of in Arabic 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.