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 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 an Arabic subtitle file looks like

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

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
صباح الخير للجميع.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
شكرًا لكم جميعًا على الحضور.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
سأشارك التفاصيل بعد قليل.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
اكتبوا أسئلتكم في الأسفل.

Right-to-left Arabic subtitles

Arabic runs right to left. Subtitle files record the text and let the player apply direction from the characters themselves, so nothing needs configuring for ordinary playback.

Lines mixing Arabic with Latin-script names, numbers or brand terms are the ones worth previewing in the player you publish to — that is where layout occasionally surprises people.

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.