Add Turkish Subtitles to a Video

What makes Turkish different on screen

Turkish uses the Latin alphabet with letters English doesn't have: ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş and ü, plus a dotted capital İ. The dot on the i is not decoration. Turkish has two separate i letters, each with its own capital.

ı and I

Dotless lowercase and its capital: ılık (lukewarm), Irmak.

i and İ

Dotted lowercase and its capital: iyi (good), İstanbul.

ğ

The soft g, which lengthens the vowel before it: dağ, değil.

ş and ç

The sh and ch sounds: şehir, çay.

Sınır means border; sinir means nerve. One dot separates them, and when it disappears the viewer has to guess from context. Everything below is about keeping those dots, hooks and cedillas exactly where they belong from transcription to the final render.

UPPERCASE styles and the dotted İ

Bold all-caps captions are common on Turkish social video, and the UPPERCASE switch in the Style panel is where Turkish text is most at risk. The editor converts text to capitals with the casing rules of the language your browser runs in (some browsers follow the operating system's language). In a browser running in Turkish, i becomes İ and ı becomes I, which is correct. In a browser running in English or most other languages, i becomes a plain I: sinir and sınır both turn into SINIR, and bir becomes BIR.

• Test it in the preview. Find a line with a lowercase i, switch UPPERCASE on and look. If you see İ, your browser is casing the Turkish way and the render will match, because preview and render share the same drawing code.
• If you see a bare I, either set your browser's display language to Turkish and reload the page, or leave UPPERCASE off and type the line in capitals yourself. Characters you type as İ stay İ.
• Lowercase ı always becomes I in any browser, so only the dotted i is at risk.

Sentence case avoids the issue entirely and is easier to read over long passages. Keep all-caps for short, punchy clips where you have checked every line.

Long words, short lines

Turkish strings suffixes onto a root: ev (house), evler (houses), evlerimiz (our houses), evlerimizden (from our houses). A spoken phrase can therefore be one or two very long words, such as görüşemediğimiz or çalışmalarımızdan, and a subtitle line has fewer places to break.

The editor breaks lines at spaces. When a subtitle needs two rows, it narrows the wrap width until both rows come out about the same length, so you don't get one long row and a single orphaned word underneath. With only three or four words per subtitle, though, that balance can still be lopsided. If a two-row subtitle looks uneven, Split it at the playhead into two timed subtitles; splitting and merging lines shows how. The reading-speed warning applies at 21 characters per second, the same as for other Latin-script languages, and long suffix chains count in full.

Getting the Turkish text

For Turkish speech, leave "Subtitle language" on auto-detect; Whisper identifies the language and writes Turkish with its own letters. Review names of people and places, which recognition may spell without their Turkish characters, and anything said over music.

To subtitle a video in another language for Turkish viewers, pick Turkish in the same menu and the lines are translated after transcription. Turkish puts the verb at the end of the sentence, and translated subtitles are divided by text length, so a split can leave the verb on the following subtitle: "Yarın sabah ofiste" and only then "buluşacağız." Viewers hold the sentence open until the verb arrives. Where the two halves fit together under about 42 characters and the timing allows, press Merge so the sentence appears in one piece.

Prefer a document over subtitles? Turkish video to text gives a transcript. Prefer to hear Turkish? Turkish is one of the dubbing languages, so the Turkish video translator can replace the voice instead.

Fonts for ğ, ş and ç

Ç, ö and ü belong to basic Latin; ğ, ş, ı and İ sit in the Latin Extended range, which the bundled Google Fonts families are generally built to include. Decorative display faces deserve a quick test before you commit. If a typeface lacks a letter, the renderer takes that letter from a fallback font, so you never see an empty box, but it will look different from its neighbours. That mismatch is your signal to pick another font.

A fast check is a Turkish pangram typed into one line: "Pijamalı hasta yağız şoföre çabucak güvendi", followed by "İstanbul". Look at the cedillas under ş and ç at your chosen size; a very heavy outline, as in the Creator preset, can fill them in on small text. Undo the test line with Ctrl or Cmd+Z when you're done. Customising subtitles walks through outline width, box padding and the other settings involved.

Worked examples

Checklist before rendering

• Every lowercase i that should carry a dot still carries it in the preview with your final style.
• Ğ, ş and ç look the same weight and design as the letters around them.
• No subtitle ends without its verb unless the next one follows immediately.
• No line is flagged as too fast to read or longer than 42 characters.
• Names are spelled the Turkish way: Şanlıurfa, Çanakkale, Gülşen, not ASCII approximations.
• On vertical video, the text clears the app overlays shown by the subtitle safe area guide.

When everything passes, render and download. If you only needed a Turkish SRT for YouTube, the subtitle file generator is the shorter path.

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