Generate Dutch subtitles for your French videos

Line length in Dutch

Dutch welds nouns together into single long words, so a sentence that fitted comfortably as French can overflow the same subtitle box once translated. The word count barely moves; the character count does.

Shorter blocks are the fix. Splitting a long line across two subtitle events costs nothing — the timings come from the original speech either way and stay in sync.

How French audio becomes Dutch subtitles

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

Why translate French video into Dutch

French is spoken principally in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and much of West and Central Africa; Dutch in the Netherlands and Belgium, where it is also called Flemish. A Dutch 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 French audio

French elides heavily in speech — words run together in ways the written form does not show — which makes word boundaries the hard part rather than the vocabulary. African and Québécois French are both well handled.

About the Dutch subtitles

Netherlands Dutch and Belgian Flemish are the same written language but differ audibly in pronunciation and in a fair amount of everyday vocabulary, and both transcribe into the same spelling. Dutch also compounds nouns into single long words the way German does, so subtitle lines run wider than the word count suggests.

What a French to Dutch subtitle file looks like

Four lines of French speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the French 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
Goedemorgen allemaal.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Bedankt allemaal voor jullie komst.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Kunnen jullie mij goed horen?

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Schrijf je vragen hieronder.

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in French may need loosening to read well in Dutch.
• Line width, since Dutch packs the same sentence into longer words than French does.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.