Generate French subtitles for your Italian videos

How Italian audio becomes French subtitles

Audio in Italian (Italiano) 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 Italian 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 Italian video into French

Italian is spoken principally in Italy, San Marino and southern 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 Italian audio

Standard Italian transcribes cleanly — spelling follows pronunciation closely. The complication is that much of what gets called an Italian dialect is a separate language rather than an accent, and Neapolitan or Sicilian speech will not transcribe as standard Italian however clear the recording is.

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 Italian to French subtitle file looks like

Four lines of Italian speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the Italian 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
À la prochaine.

What to check before publishing

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