Add Polish Subtitles to a Video

What you need first

• The video on your computer as MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV. The editor doesn't import links, so download a video from a platform before you start.
• For AI-written lines, a Google sign-in and credits: a 30-minute video costs 30 credits (3¢), and new accounts start with 100 free credits.
• For rendering, a desktop browser: Chrome or Edge 94 or later, Safari 16.4 or later, or Firefox 130 or later. Editing and SRT export also work on a phone.
• Time to read every line. Polish grammar is unforgiving of small errors: one wrong ending changes case, number or gender, and native viewers notice.

Steps to add Polish subtitles

1. Open the editor on this page and select the video.
2. If people speak Polish, keep "Subtitle language" on "Same as spoken (auto-detect)". If they speak another language, set it to Polish.
3. Click "AI subtitles". Your browser extracts and compresses the audio and uploads only that; the frames stay on your computer.
4. Review the lines. Slow the playback speed for fast talkers, and use Shift with the Left or Right arrow to step a tenth of a second when lining up a start.
5. In Style, choose a preset and a font, then type the test sentence from the next section into one line to see every Polish letter. Undo it with Ctrl or Cmd+Z.
6. Click "Render video", confirm, and download the subtitled MP4. Export SRT too if you want a file for YouTube.

Nine letters to test in your font

Polish adds nine letters to the Latin alphabet: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż. The classic pangram "Zażółć gęślą jaźń" contains all of them, which makes it an ideal one-line font test. Most of these letters sit in the Latin Extended range that the bundled Google Fonts families are generally built to cover. Decorative display faces such as Bebas Neue or Bangers are where you should look hardest, because coverage varies most among typefaces of that kind. If a font lacks a letter, the renderer borrows it from a fallback font: the right letter appears, but in a different design, which looks like a typo.

Details that matter at subtitle size:

• The ogonek, the small tail on ą and ę, can disappear into a heavy outline. The Creator preset's thick stroke is the one to check.
• Ż has a dot and ź has an accent stroke. At small sizes in a light weight they blur together, and they distinguish different words.
• The bar through ł should be clearly visible; in some condensed faces it is very short.

For help choosing, see fonts that read well as subtitles and the presets in subtitle styles.

Long words and reading speed

Polish words run long. Inflection adds endings (zarejestrowaliśmy, odpowiedzialności, najprawdopodobniej), and digraphs such as sz, cz, rz, dz and ch, plus the four-letter szcz, spend several letters on a single sound. A line therefore contains more characters than its speaking time suggests, and the "too fast to read" warning, which appears above 21 characters per second, can fire on lines that sound relaxed.

• Extend the end of the line into the pause that follows, if there is one.
• Condense. Subtitles don't need fillers such as no, jakby or po prostu, and dropping them rarely changes meaning.
• Split a line that holds two clauses, so each gets its own time on screen.
• Merge a fragment that flashes past in under 0.8 seconds with its neighbour.

When translation has to guess gender

Translating into Polish forces decisions that English leaves open. The past tense marks the speaker's gender: "I was tired" is byłem zmęczony from a man and byłam zmęczona from a woman. English "you" can be ty, wy or the polite Pan, Pani and Państwo. A machine translation has to guess from the sentence alone, and it can guess wrong or switch from line to line.

Before rendering, read every first-person past-tense line and every form of address. If the presenter is a woman, verbs and adjectives about her must be feminine throughout; if a company addresses customers, decide between the friendly ty and the formal Państwo and apply it to every line. For content that matters, a native reviewer is worth more than a second machine pass; finding a reviewer for AI translation explains how to brief one. Translated subtitles are also split by text length, so check each line's start against the speech. For a translated subtitle file rather than a burned-in video, use subtitles in another language; to replace the voice with Polish, the Polish video translator dubs it.

Troubleshooting

• An imported SRT shows question marks or odd symbols in place of ą or ł. The file was probably saved in an older Windows encoding rather than UTF-8. Open it in a text editor, save it again as UTF-8 and re-import.
• English terms inside Polish speech, common in IT and marketing, can come out spelled phonetically. Correct them by hand.
• Numbers and dates follow Polish grammar when spoken. Check that the digits on screen match what was said.
• A long recording, such as a conference day, must be cut to 2 hours or less per AI job; subtitling long videos covers the practicalities.
• For a quick review routine, use this method for checking AI subtitles.

Variations

If you only need a Polish SRT and never a burned-in video, the AI subtitle generator gets you there with fewer steps.

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