Burn Translated Subtitles Into Your Video

From speech to translated, burned-in subtitles

1. Open the editor and choose your video (MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV).
2. Leave "Write the subtitles automatically with AI" switched on and change "Subtitle language" from "Same as spoken (auto-detect)" to the language your viewers read.
3. Click "AI subtitles" and sign in with Google if asked; the job uses credits.
4. When the lines arrive, play the video and read them against the speech. Fix names, numbers and anything that sounds wrong, and drag line edges where the timing drifts.
5. Open Style, choose a preset and a font that covers the target script, and set the position. Turn on the safe-area guide if the video is vertical.
6. Click Render video, start the render and download the MP4. Export SRT or VTT too if you want the translated text as a file.

Where the translation comes from

The translation is made from what is said in the video, not from any text you supply. Your browser extracts and compresses the audio and uploads only that; the speech is transcribed with Whisper, its language is detected automatically, and the text is translated into the language you picked. The audio and text are deleted from the server within 30 minutes of delivery.

Two consequences are worth knowing before you start.

• An SRT or VTT you import can't be translated here. If you already have subtitles in the source language, either have them translated elsewhere and import the translated file, or let the AI work from the audio and ignore the existing file.
• Timing is approximate. Same-language subtitles start on the first spoken word of each phrase. Translated subtitles are split by text length, because sentences in another language don't map word for word onto the original audio, so an individual line can appear a little before or after the phrase it translates. Most of the review time on a translated video goes into nudging these edges on the timeline.

Longer or shorter text in the target language

Translations rarely keep the source's length. German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch usually need more characters than English to say the same thing, while Chinese, Japanese and Korean need far fewer characters but are read more slowly per character. Text expansion in translation explains why.

The editor's warnings are tuned per script, which makes them useful here:

Reading speed

Flags a line faster than 21 characters per second for Latin and most scripts, 17 for Thai, 12 for Korean, 9 for Chinese and 8 for Japanese.

Line length

Flags a line longer than 42 characters for most scripts, 35 for Thai, 18 for Korean and 16 for Chinese or Japanese. Long lines still wrap automatically.

Duration

Flags lines shown for under 0.8 seconds, which are hard to read in any language.

When a translated line is too fast, there are three fixes, in order of preference: shorten the wording (good subtitles condense rather than transcribe), stretch the line into a gap of silence, or use Split to break it in two at a natural pause. Merge works in the opposite direction when the AI has cut a short phrase into two flickering fragments. Splitting and merging subtitles covers both.

Scripts, direction and fonts

Arabic and Hebrew subtitles are laid out right to left, and Chinese, Japanese and Thai lines break where those writing systems allow rather than at arbitrary characters. Hindi comes out in Devanagari. If the font you pick lacks a script's characters, Noto fallback fonts fill in, so text never turns into empty boxes, but a whole line in one matching typeface looks better than a mix. Noto Sans and Noto Serif cover many scripts; Cairo is designed for Arabic and Mukta for Devanagari. The decorative display faces are aimed mainly at Latin text.

For language-specific advice, see Hindi subtitles, Arabic subtitles or Japanese subtitles, and right-to-left localization for layout issues beyond subtitles.

Reviewing a machine translation

Machine translation gets the gist of clear speech right most of the time and stumbles in predictable places: names and brand terms, idioms, jokes, formal versus informal address, numbers and units, and words that sound alike in the source audio. Errors in the transcription carry straight into the translation, so a misheard word becomes a confidently wrong translated one.

If you don't read the target language, find someone who does before publishing anything important. A practical hand-off is to Export SRT, send the file to the reviewer, have them correct it in any text or subtitle editor, then import the corrected file back and render. Post-editing machine translation describes a sensible review pass, and finding a reviewer helps if you don't have one.

When there are already subtitles in the picture

Videos made for one market often carry subtitles burned in for that market. Laying new translated lines over them produces two overlapping sets of text. The editor's blur band smudges a strip of the frame where the old subtitles sit so your translated ones can be drawn on top; it blurs rather than erases, and hiding burned-in subtitles is honest about what that looks like.

Subtitles, dubbing or both

Translated subtitles keep the original voices and cost very little; dubbing replaces the speech so viewers can listen instead of read. Plenty of videos benefit from both. When you dub a video with mydubly's AI dubbing, its result page has a "Burn subtitles" button that opens this editor with the dubbed video and its subtitles already loaded; subtitling a dubbed video covers which language to show. If you only need the translated file and not a rendered video, translated subtitles is the shorter route, and subtitles vs dubbing weighs the two approaches.

What it costs

AI subtitles are charged at 1 credit per minute of video with a 5-credit minimum, and 1,000 credits cost $1. A 12-minute talk is 12 credits (1.2¢); a 3-minute clip hits the minimum of 5 credits (0.5¢). New accounts get 100 free credits at Google sign-in and registered accounts receive 10 more every day. Videos can be up to 2 hours long, one AI job runs at a time per account, and styling, editing and rendering are free.

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