Generate French subtitles for your German videos

How German audio becomes French subtitles

Audio in German (Deutsch) is transcribed first, then translated into French (Français). Because the translation runs on the transcript rather than on the audio, the French subtitle file keeps the timings of the original German 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 German video into French

German is spoken principally in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; French in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and much of West and Central Africa. A French 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 German audio

German compounds nouns freely, producing long single words that make subtitle lines run wide — shorter blocks help. Swiss and Austrian varieties differ from standard German considerably in speech, and Swiss German especially is a real test of any recogniser.

About the French subtitles

French elides heavily in speech — words run together in ways the written form does not show — which makes word boundaries the hard part rather than the vocabulary. African and Québécois French are both well handled.

What a German to French subtitle file looks like

Four lines of German speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the German 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
Merci à tous d'être venus.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Est-ce que vous m'entendez bien ?

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Je partagerai les détails dans un instant.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Écrivez vos questions ci-dessous.

What to check before publishing

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