Generate Dutch subtitles for your Portuguese videos

Line length in Dutch

Dutch welds nouns together into single long words, so a sentence that fitted comfortably as Portuguese 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 Portuguese audio becomes Dutch subtitles

Audio in Portuguese (Português) 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 Portuguese speech — each line appears at the moment it was actually said.

Why translate Portuguese video into Dutch

Portuguese is spoken principally in Brazil, Portugal and Lusophone 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 Portuguese audio

Brazilian and European Portuguese differ enough in rhythm and vowel reduction that they can sound like separate languages to a learner. Both transcribe accurately, and the written output follows the variety spoken.

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 Portuguese to Dutch subtitle file looks like

Four lines of Portuguese speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the Portuguese 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
Bedankt allemaal voor jullie komst.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Kunnen jullie mij goed horen?

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Schrijf je vragen hieronder.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Dat was het voor vandaag.

What to check before publishing

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