Generate subtitles for your Russian videos

About Russian transcription

Russian (Русский) is written in Cyrillic and spoken principally in Russia and widely across the post-Soviet states. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Russian, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

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 Russian subtitle file looks like

Four lines as they come out of the exported SRT, in Cyrillic with the timings taken from the speech itself.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
Доброе утро всем.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Вы меня хорошо слышите?

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

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

Searching a Russian transcript

Russian is heavily inflected, so a term appears in a range of forms rather than repeating identically the way an English transcript would. That is correct output.

It does mean searching a transcript for a keyword will miss most of its occurrences unless you search for the stem — worth knowing before you use a transcript as an index.

What people caption in Russian

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

Getting a better Russian transcript

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

Russian subtitles in another language

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