Generate English subtitles for your Afrikaans videos

How Afrikaans audio becomes English subtitles

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

Both languages are written in the Latin alphabet, so the file needs nothing from your player beyond that script.

Why translate Afrikaans video into English

Afrikaans is spoken principally in South Africa and Namibia; English in worldwide. A English 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 Afrikaans audio

Afrikaans grew out of Dutch and stayed close enough to it that automatic detection between the two is unreliable on short clips. Its grammar requires a second negative at the end of a negated sentence, so a transcript ending in a repeated 'nie' is correct rather than a stutter. South African speech also switches into English mid-sentence routinely, and that is transcribed as spoken.

About the English subtitles

English has a wider spread of accents than any other language here, and the gap between spelling and pronunciation means recognition leans on context rather than sound alone. Names and technical terms are where errors concentrate, because those are exactly the words context cannot predict.

What a Afrikaans to English subtitle file looks like

Four lines of Afrikaans speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the Afrikaans 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
Thank you all for coming.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Can you hear me clearly?

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Please write your questions below.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
That's all for today.

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in Afrikaans may need loosening to read well in English.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.