Generate subtitles for your Norwegian videos

About Norwegian transcription

Norwegian (Norsk) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in Norway. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Norwegian, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

Norwegian has two official written standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, and transcription produces the more widely used Bokmål. Spoken dialects vary a great deal and are used openly in broadcasting rather than smoothed toward a standard, so what you hear may be some distance from what gets written.

What a Norwegian 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
Takk til alle for at dere kom.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Hører dere meg tydelig?

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Jeg deler detaljene om et øyeblikk.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Det var alt for i dag.

Tone and recording quality in Norwegian

Norwegian 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.

Line length in Norwegian

Norwegian welds nouns together into single long words, so a Norwegian subtitle line runs visually wider than its word count suggests.

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 Norwegian transcript

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

Norwegian subtitles in another language

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