Generate subtitles for your Finnish videos

About Finnish transcription

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

Finnish spelling maps onto pronunciation almost exactly, which makes it transcribe cleanly, but words are built by stacking endings and grow long enough to stretch a subtitle line on their own. Spoken Finnish also differs markedly from the written standard, and a transcript records the spoken form.

What a Finnish 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
Hyvää huomenta kaikille.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Aloitetaan ensimmäisestä kysymyksestä.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Kirjoittakaa kysymyksenne alle.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Siinä kaikki tältä päivältä.

Line length in Finnish

Finnish 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 Finnish transcript

Finnish 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 Finnish transcript

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

Finnish subtitles in another language

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