Generate Russian subtitles for your Lithuanian videos

From the Latin alphabet to Cyrillic

Lithuanian is written in the Latin alphabet and Russian in Cyrillic, 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 Russian 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 Lithuanian audio becomes Russian subtitles

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

Why translate Lithuanian video into Russian

Lithuanian is spoken principally in Lithuania; Russian in Russia and widely across the post-Soviet states. A Russian 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 Lithuanian audio

Lithuanian keeps grammatical features most European languages have lost, which means a heavily inflected transcript where the same word appears in many endings. Stress moves around within a word's forms and is not written, so it cannot be recovered from the transcript alone.

About the Russian subtitles

Russian is heavily inflected, so the same word appears in many forms and a transcript will not repeat a term identically the way an English one does. That is correct, not an error, and it is worth knowing before you search a transcript for a keyword.

What a Lithuanian to Russian subtitle file looks like

Four lines of Lithuanian speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the Lithuanian 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
Спасибо всем, что пришли.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Пишите свои вопросы ниже.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
На сегодня всё.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
До следующего раза.

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in Lithuanian may need loosening to read well in Russian.
• That Cyrillic renders in your player, not just in the editor you exported from.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.