Generate subtitles for your Dutch videos

About Dutch transcription

Dutch (Nederlands) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in the Netherlands and Belgium, where it is also called Flemish. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Dutch, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

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 Dutch subtitle file looks like

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

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
Kunnen jullie mij goed horen?

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Ik deel de details zo meteen.

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.

Line length in Dutch

Dutch welds nouns together into single long words, so a Dutch subtitle line runs visually wider than its word count suggests.

Shorter subtitle blocks read better as a result, and splitting one across two events costs nothing — the timings come from the speech either way.

What people caption in Dutch

The Dutch material that comes through most often is corporate video, lectures, podcasts and news. All of it works the same way — upload the file, check the transcript, export the subtitle track.

Getting a better Dutch transcript

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

Dutch subtitles in another language

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