Add Finnish Subtitles to a Video

Fewer words, longer words

Finnish builds meaning by stacking endings and joining nouns. "Talossanikin" means "in my house too"; "työterveyshuolto" is occupational health care; official texts produce compounds of 30 letters or more. For subtitles, that means fewer spaces per line and therefore fewer places where a line can break. In English, a long line wraps somewhere sensible almost automatically. In Finnish, one word can take up half the line on its own.

The good news is that ä and ö, the only letters Finnish adds to the basic Latin set, are covered by every font in the editor. The work is in line length and wording, not in rendering.

How lines break in the editor

Knowing what the renderer does lets you avoid ugly breaks rather than fix them afterwards:

Normal wrapping

A line wider than the space allowed wraps at a space, and the lines of a block are balanced so one doesn't end with a lone word.

A single overlong word

If one word is wider than the maximum line width on its own, it is split between letters, without a hyphen. This is a last resort and Finnish readers will notice it.

Your own line breaks

A line break you type in the text box is always kept, so you control where a two-line block divides.

To keep compounds whole, lower the font size a step, raise the maximum line width in Style, or pick a condensed typeface such as Oswald or Bebas Neue that fits more letters per line. When a word must be broken, break it yourself at the seam of the compound with a hyphen, for example "työterveys-" on one line and "huolto" on the next.

How to add Finnish subtitles to a video

1. Open the editor and choose your MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV file.
2. Leave "Subtitle language" on auto-detect for Finnish speech, or choose Finnish to translate English or another supported language into Finnish.
3. Click AI subtitles. The audio is sent for recognition and the video stays on your computer; a 30-minute webinar costs 30 credits (3¢).
4. Read through the lines with the video playing and fix spelling, word length and names.
5. Open Style, set your size, then play the longest lines and look at how they wrap. Adjust size, maximum line width or font until no compound is cut.
6. Render video, then Download video. Export SRT or VTT if you need a track as well.

Spoken Finnish versus written Finnish

Finns speak puhekieli and write kirjakieli, and the gap is wide: "mä oon" in speech is "minä olen" on paper. The recognizer's output can land anywhere between the two, sometimes mixing them in one line. Pick a register for the whole video. Written standard suits training, corporate and educational content; casual spoken forms can suit a vlog, as long as they are consistent.

Length matters to the recognizer as well. Finnish distinguishes long and short sounds in ways that change meaning: tuli (fire) and tuuli (wind), kuka (who) and kukka (flower), tapan and tappan. A misheard vowel or consonant length produces a real but wrong word, which a spellchecker won't catch. Read for meaning, not only for typos.

Swedish place names are another trap in bilingual areas: decide between Helsinki and Helsingfors, Turku and Åbo, and keep to it.

Holding the reading speed down

Long words mean many characters for each idea, so Finnish subtitles hit the editor's "too fast to read" warning (over 21 characters per second) more often than English ones do. The fix is the one Finnish television subtitlers use: condense. Drop "niinku", "tota" and other fillers, collapse repetitions, and keep only what the viewer needs to follow. Where the speech is fast and nothing can go, extend the line slightly into the following pause by dragging its end on the timeline.

Translations into Finnish deserve extra attention here because their timing is set from text length, not matched word for word to the speech. If a translated line appears before the speaker reaches that point, drag it later; adjusting subtitle timing explains the tools. The AI's short one-line captions help too, since each one covers only a phrase.

Finnish and Swedish together

Finnish television often shows Finnish and Swedish subtitles at once, one line above the other. You can do the same: put the Finnish line and the Swedish line in one subtitle with a line break between them. The AI writes one language per run, so the second language is typed or pasted in. Keep each subtitle to two lines when you do this; the editor warns at more than three. The Swedish subtitles page covers the Swedish side, and dual-language subtitles the general approach.

Examples

For a Finnish subtitle file without rendering, the subtitle generator is enough, and to translate the voice as well as the text, see the Finnish video translator.

About the subtitle editor on this page

Opens

MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, MKV videos your browser can decode

Subtitles from

AI (from the speech, optionally translated into one of 21 languages), an SRT or VTT file, or typing them in

You download

An MP4 with the subtitles drawn into the picture at the original resolution and frame rate, plus SRT and VTT files

Cost

Editing, styling, rendering and SRT/VTT export are free, with no account and no watermark. AI subtitles cost 1 credit per minute (5-credit minimum per video); signing in with Google gives 100 free credits and accounts get 10 free credits a day

Privacy

The video never leaves your device and is rendered in your browser. Only for AI subtitles is the audio sent, over HTTPS, and it is deleted within 30 minutes of delivery

Rendering needs

Chrome or Edge 94+, Safari 16.4+, or Firefox 130+ on a computer. Editing and SRT/VTT export work in any current browser