Generate Turkish subtitles for your Arabic videos

From right-to-left Arabic into Turkish

Arabic runs right to left and Turkish runs left to right, so the subtitle file reverses direction relative to the speech. Nothing needs configuring for that, but it is worth previewing once before you publish.

Mixed passages — a Latin-script brand name or number inside a right-to-left line — are where rendering most often looks wrong, and they are worth checking in the player you actually publish to rather than in a text editor.

How Arabic audio becomes Turkish subtitles

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

From the Arabic script to the Latin alphabet

Arabic is written in the Arabic script and Turkish in the Latin alphabet, 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 Turkish 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.

Line length in Turkish

Turkish builds meaning by stacking endings onto a stem, which produces fewer words but much longer ones. A Arabic line often arrives as a shorter, denser Turkish line that still overruns two rows.

Shorter blocks are the fix. Splitting a long line across two subtitle events costs nothing — the timings come from the original speech either way and stay in sync.

Turkish diacritics are part of the word

Turkish uses marks above and below its letters that change which word it is rather than only how it sounds. Stripping them, as some older subtitle tooling and a few upload pipelines still do, produces text that is wrong rather than merely plain.

Open the exported file once and confirm the marks survived before you rely on a workflow. If they did not, the problem is almost always an encoding setting rather than the Turkish text itself.

Why translate Arabic video into Turkish

Arabic is spoken principally in North Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula; Turkish in Turkey and Cyprus. A Turkish 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 Arabic audio

The gap between Modern Standard Arabic and the regional dialects is the thing to plan around: broadcast news is close to the standard, while everyday Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine and Maghrebi speech diverge from it considerably. Standard-register material transcribes markedly better than heavy dialect.

About the Turkish subtitles

Turkish is agglutinative: a single word can carry what English needs a clause for, so word counts are low and individual words are long. Spelling is highly regular, which makes it transcribe cleanly.

What a Arabic to Turkish subtitle file looks like

Four lines of Arabic speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the Arabic 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
Geldiğiniz için hepinize teşekkür ederim.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Detayları birazdan paylaşacağım.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Sorularınızı aşağıya yazın.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Bir dahaki sefere görüşürüz.

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in Arabic may need loosening to read well in Turkish.
• Line width, since Turkish packs the same sentence into longer words than Arabic does.
• That the Latin alphabet renders in your player, not just in the editor you exported from.
• That Turkish diacritics survived the export — they change the word, not just its pronunciation.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.