Generate subtitles for your German videos

About German transcription

German (Deutsch) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written German, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

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 German 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
Beginnen wir mit der ersten Frage.

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

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Schreiben Sie Ihre Fragen unten.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Das war's für heute.

Line length in German

German welds nouns together into single long words, so a German subtitle line runs visually wider than its word count suggests.

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

What people caption in German

The German material that comes through most often is lectures, corporate and technical video, interviews and documentaries. All of it works the same way — upload the file, check the transcript, export the subtitle track.

Getting a better German transcript

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

German subtitles in another language

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