Generate Gujarati subtitles for your Urdu videos

From right-to-left Urdu into Gujarati

Urdu runs right to left and Gujarati runs left to right, so the subtitle file reverses direction relative to the speech. Nothing needs configuring for that, but it is worth previewing once before you publish.

Mixed passages — a Latin-script brand name or number inside a right-to-left line — are where rendering most often looks wrong, and they are worth checking in the player you actually publish to rather than in a text editor.

How Urdu audio becomes Gujarati subtitles

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

From Nastaliq to the Gujarati script

Urdu is written in Perso-Arabic, in the Nastaliq style and Gujarati in the Gujarati script, so the exported file uses a different writing system from the audio that produced it. The subtitle formats handle that — SRT and VTT are plain text and carry any script — but the font in whatever plays the file has to cover it.

This is the most common reason a Gujarati subtitle track looks correct in an editor and shows boxes or blanks on a device. Test on the target platform before you publish a batch.

Why translate Urdu video into Gujarati

Urdu is spoken principally in Pakistan and northern India; Gujarati in Gujarat, in western India, and a large diaspora. A Gujarati 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 Urdu audio

Urdu and Hindi are close to identical in speech and quite different on the page — the same sentence transcribes into Nastaliq here and Devanagari under Hindi. Pick by the script you need the subtitle file in, not by how the audio sounds. Nastaliq is right-to-left, and most players handle it correctly from an SRT without any extra configuration.

About the Gujarati subtitles

The Gujarati script is closely related to Devanagari but drops the horizontal line along the top of each word, which is the quickest way to tell the two apart in a subtitle file. Business and trade recordings mix in English terms heavily, and those are transcribed as spoken rather than translated into Gujarati equivalents.

What a Urdu to Gujarati subtitle file looks like

Four lines of Urdu speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the Urdu 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
બધાને સુપ્રભાત.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
આવવા બદલ બધાનો આભાર.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
હું થોડી વારમાં વિગતો જણાવીશ.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
તમારા પ્રશ્નો નીચે લખો.

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in Urdu may need loosening to read well in Gujarati.
• That the Gujarati script renders in your player, not just in the editor you exported from.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.