Add Norwegian Subtitles to a Video

Many dialects, two written standards

Norwegians speak their dialects everywhere, from the news to board meetings, and nobody writes the way they talk. Written Norwegian comes in two official standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, and subtitles are expected to use one of them, not to spell out the dialect. That makes Norwegian subtitling partly a transcription job and partly a normalisation job.

Speech recognition behaves the same way: it hears the dialect and writes standard written words. The written form it chooses will usually be close to Bokmål. If your organisation or channel publishes in Nynorsk, plan to edit the lines by hand, and keep in mind that the translation target is simply called Norwegian.

Before you open the editor

• A video in MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV, and a desktop browser for the final render.
• A decision on Bokmål or Nynorsk, and on how much dialect flavour you want to keep in quotes and names.
• A way to type æ, ø and å if your keyboard lacks them. On a Mac with a US or UK layout: Option+' gives æ, Option+o gives ø, Option+a gives å. On Windows, hold Alt and type 0230, 0248 or 0229 on the number pad, or add the Norwegian keyboard layout in Settings.
• For SRT files from other tools, a quick look in a text editor. Files must be UTF-8; one saved in an old Western European encoding will show symbols in place of æ, ø and å, and saving it again as UTF-8 fixes that.

How to add Norwegian subtitles to a video

1. Open the editor on this page and choose the video.
2. For Norwegian speech, keep "Subtitle language" on auto-detect or set Norwegian. For an English or other source, set Norwegian to translate it.
3. Click AI subtitles. The audio is uploaded over HTTPS for recognition; the video itself is not. A 10-minute clip costs 10 credits (1¢).
4. Watch from the start and edit each line into your written standard. Ctrl or Cmd+Z undoes a change if you go too far.
5. Style the text, check it against the safe-area guide, then click Render video followed by Download video.
6. Export SRT or VTT as well if the video is going to a platform that takes subtitle tracks.

No AI needed? Switch it off, then import a subtitle file or type each line at the playhead with Enter. Without AI, the video and the subtitle text stay on your computer and no account is required.

From dialect to written Norwegian

The most frequent edits are the same across most videos:

• Pronouns. "Æ", "eg", "jæ" and "i" in speech are "jeg" in Bokmål and "eg" in Nynorsk. "Dokker" and "dere" have their own written forms.
• Verb and noun endings. Many dialects use forms like "kasta" or "boka". Bokmål allows some of these and Nynorsk others; pick a consistent set.
• Place and family names. These are where misrecognition clusters. Check every name against a reliable spelling.
• Numbers. Norwegian uses a decimal comma and a space between thousands: 2,5 prosent, 12 000 kroner.
• English loanwords. Common in tech and business talk; decide whether they stay English and keep the choice.

If a speaker's dialect is part of the point, such as in a documentary or an interview with a local character, you can keep a few characteristic words in a quoted line. Do it on purpose, not by accident.

Translating into Norwegian

When the speech is English, choosing Norwegian gives you translated subtitles in one run. Treat them as a careful first draft. Machine translation tends to follow English word order and can produce Danish-looking or overly formal phrasing that a Norwegian reader finds stiff; rewrite those lines the way a person would say them. Translated lines are timed by their length rather than matched exactly to each word, so check that every subtitle appears with the speech it belongs to, and move lines on the timeline where they don't.

To give Norwegian viewers a voice instead of text, AI dubbing has a Norwegian voice, and the Norwegian video translator is the page for translating the whole video.

Readable on screen

Norwegian viewers, like their Swedish neighbours, are used to subtitles on foreign TV and expect clear text at the bottom with no more than two lines. The AI writes short single-line subtitles, which work well for social clips; for longer content you can join neighbouring lines with Merge to get the two-line blocks people expect. Watch the "too fast to read" warning, which appears above 21 characters per second, and the 42-character line warning. Subtitle styles shows the presets; Classic and YouTube suit most Norwegian content.

Publishing the result

The rendered MP4 shows the Norwegian subtitles everywhere: in Messenger, on Instagram, in a presentation or on an intranet that doesn't accept tracks. For YouTube or Vimeo, upload the exported SRT as well so viewers can switch it off and the platform can index the words; YouTube subtitles explains the trade-off. For a Norwegian subtitle file only, the subtitle generator skips the render. And if you are making Swedish and Norwegian versions of the same video, the Swedish page covers what changes on the other side of the border.

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