Generate Japanese subtitles for your English videos

From the Latin alphabet to kanji and kana

English is written in the Latin alphabet and Japanese in a mix of kanji, hiragana and katakana, 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 Japanese 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.

How English audio becomes Japanese subtitles

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

Register in Japanese subtitles

Japanese marks politeness grammatically, so a translator has to choose a level of formality that the English original may not have stated. The same sentence can be rendered casually or deferentially and both are accurate translations of the words.

Check the register before publishing anything with a clear audience — an interview, a lecture, a customer-facing video. It reads as a mistake to a native speaker far more readily than an awkward word choice does.

Line length in Japanese

Japanese builds meaning by stacking endings onto a stem, which produces fewer words but much longer ones. A English line often arrives as a shorter, denser Japanese line that still overruns two rows.

Shorter blocks are the fix. Splitting a long line across two subtitle events costs nothing — the timings come from the original speech either way and stay in sync.

Why translate English video into Japanese

English is spoken principally in worldwide; Japanese in Japan. A Japanese 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 English audio

English has a wider spread of accents than any other language here, and the gap between spelling and pronunciation means recognition leans on context rather than sound alone. Names and technical terms are where errors concentrate, because those are exactly the words context cannot predict.

About the Japanese subtitles

Japanese is written without spaces between words, so segmentation is part of recognition rather than something that happens afterwards — this is why word-level timings matter more here than in a space-separated language. Output mixes kanji, hiragana and katakana as normal written Japanese does.

What an English to Japanese subtitle file looks like

Four lines of English speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the English 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
皆さん、おはようございます。

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
私の声はよく聞こえますか。

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
詳細はこの後すぐ共有します。

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
また次回お会いしましょう。

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in English may need loosening to read well in Japanese.
• Line width, since Japanese packs the same sentence into longer words than English does.
• That a mix of kanji, hiragana and katakana renders in your player, not just in the editor you exported from.
• The level of formality, which Japanese states grammatically whether or not the English original did.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.