Generate Dutch subtitles for your Spanish videos

Line length in Dutch

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

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

Why translate Spanish video into Dutch

Spanish is spoken principally in Spain and most of Latin America; 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 Spanish audio

European and Latin American Spanish differ in pronunciation, pronoun use and a good deal of everyday vocabulary, and Caribbean and Rioplatense speech diverge further still. All transcribe well; the variety is preserved rather than standardised.

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 Spanish to Dutch subtitle file looks like

Four lines of Spanish speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the Spanish 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
Laten we beginnen met de eerste vraag.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Ik deel de details zo meteen.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Tot de volgende keer.

What to check before publishing

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