Generate subtitles for your Estonian videos

About Estonian transcription

Estonian (Eesti) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in Estonia. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Estonian, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

Estonian distinguishes three degrees of sound length where most languages manage two, and the difference is not always visible in the spelling — it changes the meaning without changing the letters. It is also agglutinative, so single words carry what English would spread across a phrase.

What an Estonian 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
Tere hommikust kõigile.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Aitäh teile kõigile, et tulite.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Kirjutage oma küsimused allpool.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Kohtume järgmisel korral.

Line length in Estonian

Estonian builds meaning by stacking endings onto a stem, producing few words but long ones. Lines come out dense rather than wordy.

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

Searching a Estonian transcript

Estonian is heavily inflected, so a term appears in a range of forms rather than repeating identically the way an English transcript would. That is correct output.

It does mean searching a transcript for a keyword will miss most of its occurrences unless you search for the stem — worth knowing before you use a transcript as an index.

Getting a better Estonian transcript

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

Estonian subtitles in another language

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