Generate Italian subtitles for your French videos

How French audio becomes Italian subtitles

Audio in French (Français) is transcribed first, then translated into Italian (Italiano). Because the translation runs on the transcript rather than on the audio, the Italian subtitle file keeps the timings of the original French 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 French video into Italian

French is spoken principally in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and much of West and Central Africa; Italian in Italy, San Marino and southern Switzerland. A Italian 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 Italian subtitles

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.

What a French to Italian 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
Grazie a tutti per essere venuti.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Condividerò i dettagli tra poco.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Scrivete le vostre domande qui sotto.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Per oggi è tutto.

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 Italian.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.