Generate Chinese subtitles for your Korean videos

From Hangul to Chinese characters

Korean is written in Hangul and Chinese in Chinese characters, 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 Chinese 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.

How Korean audio becomes Chinese subtitles

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

Why translate Korean video into Chinese

Korean is spoken principally in South Korea and North Korea; Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore and Chinese-speaking communities worldwide. A Chinese 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 Korean audio

Korean marks formality grammatically, and the register a speaker uses carries real information — transcription preserves it rather than flattening everything into one politeness level. Hangul is featural and compact, so Korean subtitle lines tend to fit comfortably in two rows.

About the Chinese subtitles

Like Japanese, Chinese is written without spaces, so word boundaries are inferred during recognition. Mandarin is what is transcribed; Cantonese is a separate option and choosing the wrong one produces fluent-looking output that does not match the audio.

What a Korean to Chinese subtitle file looks like

Four lines of Korean speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the Korean 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
我们从第一个问题开始吧。

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
你们能听清楚我说话吗？

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
请把你们的问题写在下面。

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
下次见。

What to check before publishing

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