Add Portuguese Subtitles to a Video

Pick the Portuguese your viewers read

The "Subtitle language" menu lists three Portuguese entries: Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil) and Portuguese (Portugal). Which one you want depends on what is spoken in the video, not only on who will watch it.

The speaker already talks in Portuguese

Keep "Same as spoken (auto-detect)". Whisper writes down what was said in the speaker's own variety, so a presenter from Porto stays European and one from Recife stays Brazilian.

English, Spanish or another language, for Brazil

Choose Portuguese (Brazil). The translation is requested in Brazilian Portuguese, so word choice should lean toward forms like celular and tela.

Another language, for Portugal

Choose Portuguese (Portugal). The translation is requested in European Portuguese, aiming at forms like telemóvel and ecrã.

Viewers on both sides of the Atlantic

Plain Portuguese leaves the variety unspecified. Fine for neutral material, but expect wording that leans one way or the other.

One detail catches people out. If the speech is already Portuguese and you pick Portuguese (Brazil), nothing is translated: the system sees that source and target are the same language and returns the transcript as spoken. The regional option steers a translation from another language; it does not turn a Lisbon accent into São Paulo vocabulary. Adapting a European recording for Brazilian viewers, or the reverse, is a manual edit in the line list.

Putting Portuguese subtitles on your video, step by step

1. Open the editor on this page and select the video. It reads MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM and MKV files from your computer; download the clip first if it only exists online.
2. To have the subtitles written for you, keep "Write the subtitles automatically with AI" switched on, choose the Portuguese entry from the table above under "Subtitle language", press AI subtitles and sign in with Google. To use a file from a translator instead, switch AI off and click "Import SRT / VTT".
3. Play the video and read along. Fix names, brands and numbers first, then look for words from the wrong side of the Atlantic.
4. Open the Style tab and pick a preset. Portuguese lines run long, so try a slightly smaller size or a wider max line width before you settle on a look.
5. Click Render video, start the render from the summary, and save the file with Download video. Export SRT as well if you also want a caption file for YouTube or Vimeo.

Pricing for the AI pass is per minute: a 12-minute class costs 12 credits (1.2¢), and a 3-minute clip is billed at the 5-credit minimum (0.5¢). Importing or typing the legendas is free.

Brazilian and European wording to watch

Brazilian and European Portuguese are mutually intelligible, but readers notice the other variety at once, and a subtitle that mixes the two reads as careless to everyone. When you proof, these are the usual giveaways:

• Everyday nouns: ônibus or autocarro (bus), celular or telemóvel, tela or ecrã, arquivo or ficheiro, trem or comboio, usuário or utilizador, café da manhã or pequeno-almoço.
• Addressing the viewer: Brazilian video talks to "você" almost everywhere, while in Portugal "tu" is common between friends and more formal forms are used with strangers.
• Actions in progress: Brazil says "estou fazendo", Portugal "estou a fazer".
• Pronoun position: a Brazilian sentence can open with "me disse", where European usage puts the pronoun after the verb, "disse-me".
• Accent marks that differ: económico and género in Portugal, econômico and gênero in Brazil, because the vowel is pronounced differently.
• Spellings the 1990 spelling agreement left apart: fato and facto (fact), recepção and receção.

The translation for a chosen variant will mostly be consistent, but a European word can still slip into a Brazilian file and vice versa, especially in technical or product vocabulary. For a broader look at adapting a video for one region, see translating video for regional audiences.

Accents, cedilla and capital letters on screen

All 19 fonts in the Style panel include the Portuguese letters á, â, ã, à, ç, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ and ú, so you can choose on looks alone. A few things are still worth a glance in the preview:

• The editor counts "ã" or "ç" as one character when it checks reading speed, even if the letter was typed as a base letter plus a separate accent mark.
• UPPERCASE, which the Creator preset switches on, puts tildes and circumflexes on capitals: NÃO, AÇÃO, VOCÊ. On a two-line subtitle with tight line height those marks sit close to the line above; raise the line height a step if they look cramped.
• If an imported SRT shows a � symbol where "ã" or "ç" should be, the file was saved in an older encoding such as Windows-1252, while the editor reads subtitle files as UTF-8. Re-save it as UTF-8 in a text editor and import it again; subtitles showing strange characters explains the cause.

For choosing a face that stays readable at speed, fonts for subtitles compares the bundled typefaces.

When the Portuguese runs long

Portuguese usually needs more letters than English to say the same thing, so a translated video produces denser lines than its English source; text expansion in translation explains why. The editor flags any line over 42 characters, which still wraps on screen, and any subtitle that asks for more than 21 characters per second of reading.

AI output arrives as single lines of about 32 characters, each held for up to about 2.6 seconds and starting on the first spoken word when the speech is transcribed. Translated lines are different: their time is shared out by text length, so a line can start a little before or after the matching words. Drag its edges on the timeline, or type exact times in the list, to pull it into place.

Shortening is usually better than squeezing. Fillers such as "né", "então" and "tipo" can go; "neste momento" can become "agora"; a repeated subject can be dropped because the verb ending already carries it. If one line still holds two thoughts, place the playhead between them and press Split; if two short lines belong together, Merge stacks them into a two-line subtitle. Splitting and merging subtitles shows both in more detail.

Three Portuguese projects

If all you need is the subtitle file, the Portuguese subtitle generator stops at the SRT. For a Portuguese voice track rather than text, the Portuguese video translator dubs the speech, and Portuguese video to text gives you a plain transcript. Making a Spanish version at the same time? See Spanish subtitles.

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