Generate subtitles for your Chinese videos

About Chinese transcription

Chinese (中文) is written in Chinese characters and spoken principally in mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore and Chinese-speaking communities worldwide. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Chinese, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

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 Chinese subtitle file looks like

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

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
大家早上好。

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。

Where Chinese words begin and end

Chinese is written without spaces between words, so segmentation is part of recognition rather than a tidy-up afterwards. This is why word-level timings matter more here than in a space-separated language — the boundaries are inferred, not read off the page.

Subtitle lines are worth spot-checking at their start and end, which is where those decisions land.

Tone and recording quality in Chinese

Chinese uses pitch to distinguish words that are otherwise the same, so recognition leans on tone as well as on the sounds. Background music costs more accuracy here than it would elsewhere, because it competes with exactly that cue.

Where tone is misheard the result is a real word rather than obvious nonsense, so errors read as plausible and are worth a deliberate check.

What people caption in Chinese

The Chinese material that comes through most often is lectures and courses, business content, vlogs and news. All of it works the same way — upload the file, check the transcript, export the subtitle track.

Getting a better Chinese transcript

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

Chinese subtitles in another language

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