Generate subtitles for your Javanese videos

About Javanese transcription

Javanese (Basa Jawa) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in Java, in Indonesia. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Javanese, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

Javanese encodes politeness in vocabulary rather than in tone of voice: the formal and informal registers use different words for the same thing, and which one a speaker picks carries real information about the situation. Transcription preserves the register spoken. Indonesian is mixed in freely and is transcribed as spoken.

Register in a Javanese transcript

Javanese marks politeness grammatically, so the level a speaker uses carries real information about who they are addressing. Transcription preserves it rather than flattening everything to one register.

That makes a transcript useful as a record of how something was said, not only what was said — worth knowing before you edit it toward consistency.

Line length in Javanese

Javanese builds meaning by stacking endings onto a stem, producing few words but long ones. Lines come out dense rather than wordy.

Shorter subtitle blocks read better as a result, and splitting one across two events costs nothing — the timings come from the speech either way.

Getting a better Javanese transcript

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

Javanese subtitles in another language

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