Generate subtitles for your Urdu videos

About Urdu transcription

Urdu (اردو) is written in Perso-Arabic, in the Nastaliq style and spoken principally in Pakistan and northern India. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Urdu, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

Urdu and Hindi are close to identical in speech and quite different on the page — the same sentence transcribes into Nastaliq here and Devanagari under Hindi. Pick by the script you need the subtitle file in, not by how the audio sounds. Nastaliq is right-to-left, and most players handle it correctly from an SRT without any extra configuration.

What an Urdu subtitle file looks like

Four lines as they come out of the exported SRT, in Perso-Arabic, in the Nastaliq style with the timings taken from the speech itself.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
سب کو صبح بخیر۔

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
آپ سب کے آنے کا شکریہ۔

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
کیا آپ مجھے صاف سن رہے ہیں؟

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
آج کے لیے بس اتنا ہی۔

Right-to-left Urdu subtitles

Urdu runs right to left. Subtitle files record the text and let the player apply direction from the characters themselves, so nothing needs configuring for ordinary playback.

Lines mixing Urdu with Latin-script names, numbers or brand terms are the ones worth previewing in the player you publish to — that is where layout occasionally surprises people.

What people caption in Urdu

The Urdu material that comes through most often is news and current affairs, dramas, religious lectures and vlogs. All of it works the same way — upload the file, check the transcript, export the subtitle track.

Getting a better Urdu transcript

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

Urdu subtitles in another language

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