Generate subtitles for your Italian videos

About Italian transcription

Italian (Italiano) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in Italy, San Marino and southern Switzerland. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Italian, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

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 an Italian 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
Cominciamo con la prima domanda.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Mi sentite bene?

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Per oggi è tutto.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Alla prossima.

What people caption in Italian

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

Getting a better Italian transcript

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

Italian subtitles in another language

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