Generate subtitles for your Tamil videos

About Tamil transcription

Tamil (தமிழ்) is written in the Tamil script and spoken principally in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Tamil, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

Spoken Tamil differs substantially from the written literary form, and transcription follows what was actually said rather than normalising it upward. Tamil films and vlogs also mix in English freely — the 'Tanglish' register — and that mixing is transcribed as spoken rather than translated away.

What a Tamil subtitle file looks like

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

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
அனைவருக்கும் காலை வணக்கம்.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
விவரங்களை சிறிது நேரத்தில் பகிர்கிறேன்.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
உங்கள் கேள்விகளை கீழே எழுதுங்கள்.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
அடுத்த முறை சந்திப்போம்.

Line length in Tamil

Tamil 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.

What people caption in Tamil

The Tamil material that comes through most often is film clips and reviews, vlogs, devotional content and classroom recordings. All of it works the same way — upload the file, check the transcript, export the subtitle track.

Getting a better Tamil transcript

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

Tamil subtitles in another language

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