Add Swedish Subtitles to a Video

Swedes are expert subtitle readers

Sweden subtitles most foreign films and series rather than dubbing them, with children's programmes as the main exception. Years of that have produced an audience that reads fast and has firm expectations: text centred near the bottom, white letters that stay legible, no more than two lines at a time, and wording condensed rather than transcribed word for word. When a second person speaks in the same subtitle, each line starts with a dash.

The AI in this editor writes something different by design: short single-line captions that follow speech phrase by phrase, a style built for phones and social feeds watched with the sound off. Neither is wrong. Decide which one you are making before you start editing:

Social clip or Reel

Keep the short AI lines, raise the size, and use the Social Media preset for 9:16 video.

Interview, talk or short film

Merge neighbouring lines into two-line blocks and use a calm preset such as Classic or Cinema.

What to have ready

• The video as MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV. Rendering needs a desktop browser: Chrome or Edge 94+, Safari 16.4+ or Firefox 130+.
• A Google sign-in if you want AI subtitles. They cost 1 credit per minute of video, so a 20-minute interview is 20 credits (2¢); new accounts start with 100 free credits.
• If a translator sends you an SRT, check its encoding first. The editor reads subtitle files as UTF-8. Files saved by older Windows tools in Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 come in with odd symbols where å, ä and ö belong. Open the file in a text editor, save it again as UTF-8 and import that copy. The post on subtitles showing strange characters explains why it happens.

How to add Swedish subtitles to a video

1. Open the editor and choose your video file.
2. For Swedish speech, leave "Subtitle language" on auto-detect or pick Swedish. For an English video, pick Swedish to get a translation.
3. Press AI subtitles and wait for the lines to appear in the list and on the timeline. Or switch AI off and use Import SRT / VTT.
4. Play the video with Space and move through lines with the Up and Down arrows, correcting words as you go.
5. For the traditional two-line look, select the first of two short lines and press Merge. The merged subtitle keeps each part on its own line and runs from the first start to the second end.
6. Pick a preset in Style, then press Render video and Download video. Export SRT too if you also upload a track to YouTube.

Proofreading machine Swedish

Speech recognition is strong on clear Swedish, but a few error types turn up again and again, and Swedish readers spot all of them:

• Split compounds. "Kyckling lever" and "kycklinglever" mean different things, and särskrivning is the error Swedes love to point out. Check compound nouns, especially in translated lines.
• Regional speech. Skåne, Norrland and Finland-Swedish accents, and fast casual speech, produce more misheard words than studio Swedish. Place names suffer most.
• Numbers. Swedish writes a decimal comma and a space between thousands: 3,5 miljoner and 10 000 kronor. A translation from English may keep the English punctuation.
• English mixed in. Swedish business talk borrows freely from English. Decide whether "deadline" or "meeting" stays English in the subtitles and keep that choice consistent.
• Address. Swedish uses "du" almost everywhere. If a translated marketing line suddenly says "ni", consider changing it.

When the source is English

Translated subtitles are cut by text length rather than aligned word by word to the speech, so each line's timing is approximate. Watch with the sound on and drag any line that starts before its sentence does; the timeline snaps to 10 ms, and dragging an edge changes only that end. If the whole file is late by the same amount, "Shift all by" moves every line at once. Burning translated subtitles goes deeper into reviewing a translation against the original audio.

If your Swedish viewers would rather listen than read, a Swedish voice is available through AI dubbing, and the Swedish video translator is the page for that whole job.

Fixing common problems

Letters turn into boxes or question marks

The imported file isn't UTF-8. Re-save it as UTF-8 and import it again.

"Too fast to read" on a line

It needs more than 21 characters per second. Cut filler words or give the line more time.

A merged block looks cramped

Increase the maximum line width in Style or lower the size a step.

Subtitles cover on-screen names

Move them to the top for that video, or raise the vertical offset.

Two speakers in one block

Start each line with a dash and a space, as Swedish subtitles traditionally do.

Other ways to use it

For Swedish learners, a block with the Swedish line above and the English one below works well; the idea is covered in dual-language subtitles. For a Swedish subtitle file and no video, go to the subtitle file generator. Going to YouTube? The YouTube subtitles page explains when to upload a track and when to burn in, and subtitle styles shows each preset on real footage.

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