Generate subtitles for your Hausa videos

About Hausa transcription

Hausa (Hausa) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in northern Nigeria, Niger and across the Sahel. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Hausa, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

Hausa is tonal, and its standard Latin orthography uses hooked letters — ɓ, ɗ and ƙ — for sounds English has no equivalent of. Those characters are part of the word, so check that whatever plays your subtitle file renders them rather than substituting plain b, d and k. Hausa is also written in the Arabic-derived Ajami script in some contexts; transcription here produces the Latin form.

Tone and recording quality in Hausa

Hausa uses pitch to distinguish words that are otherwise the same, so recognition leans on tone as well as on the sounds. Background music costs more accuracy here than it would elsewhere, because it competes with exactly that cue.

Where tone is misheard the result is a real word rather than obvious nonsense, so errors read as plausible and are worth a deliberate check.

What people caption in Hausa

The Hausa material that comes through most often is news, religious lectures, film content and radio recordings. All of it works the same way — upload the file, check the transcript, export the subtitle track.

Getting a better Hausa transcript

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

Hausa subtitles in another language

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