Generate German subtitles for your French videos

Line length in German

German welds nouns together into single long words, so a sentence that fitted comfortably as French can overflow the same subtitle box once translated. The word count barely moves; the character count does.

Shorter blocks are the fix. Splitting a long line across two subtitle events costs nothing — the timings come from the original speech either way and stay in sync.

How French audio becomes German subtitles

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

Why translate French video into German

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

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.

About the German subtitles

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.

What a French to German subtitle file looks like

Four lines of French speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the French 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
Guten Morgen zusammen.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Können Sie mich gut hören?

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Ich teile die Details gleich mit.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Bis zum nächsten Mal.

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in French may need loosening to read well in German.
• Line width, since German packs the same sentence into longer words than French does.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.