Translate Japanese Video to English

What you get back

• An English transcript next to the original Japanese transcript, plus a timestamped version.
• English subtitles as SRT and VTT files.
• With Full translation output on: an English voice track in which each person (up to 8) speaks in a copy of their own voice, the translated audio as M4A, and an MP4 that keeps your original picture, music and effects.
• Japanese is detected automatically. The tool above is already set to English, so you only drop in the file.

Japanese to English at a glance

Japanese to English has to add subjects that Japanese leaves out, so the translation sometimes guesses 'he', 'she' or 'we' wrongly. English text is longer than the Japanese character count suggests.

Japanese often omits subjects and objects that English needs, so the translation has to infer them. In conversations this can produce the wrong pronoun; in narrated content where context is clear, it's rarely a problem. Review lines where 'he', 'she' or 'they' matter.

Japanese creators — cooking, crafts, gaming, travel — translate into English to reach the large international audience for Japanese content. Keep Japanese terms your audience knows (like dish names) consistent in the English transcript.

Politeness English can't show

Japanese grammar encodes who is speaking to whom. Polite desu/masu forms, honorific verbs for a customer (いらっしゃる) and humble verbs for oneself (伺う) all collapse into plain English. A salesperson's carefully deferential pitch and a casual chat between colleagues can therefore read alike in the English transcript. For business recordings, that loss rarely changes the meaning; for interviews where tone matters, note in your write-up that the original was formal.

Japanese conversation is also full of short responses: はい, そうですね, なるほど. They become a stream of "yes", "right" and "I see" lines in the English. In subtitles you can delete the ones that add nothing, which makes the cues easier to read; the subtitle readability guide explains how much text viewers can take in per second.

Loanwords that changed meaning

Japanese borrows heavily from English, but many borrowings shifted on the way. マンション is a flat or condominium, サラリーマン an office worker, コンセント a power socket, and クレーム a complaint. The translation usually renders these correctly, yet when a sentence is ambiguous a literal "mansion" or "claim" can slip through. Words made in Japan from English parts (wasei-eigo) are the ones to scan for in product, real-estate and customer-service videos.

Counting in 万 and 億

Japanese groups large numbers in tens of thousands. 3万円 is 30,000 yen, 50万 is 500,000, and 1億 is 100 million. Translation converts these, but a spoken figure that was misheard in the Japanese transcript arrives as a confident wrong number. Read every price, headcount and sales figure against the Japanese transcript. Dates may come in era years: 令和6年 is 2024. Check that they were converted the way your English readers expect.

English subtitles from Japanese speech

English needs more characters than Japanese for the same content, so a fast Japanese speaker produces long English cues. Subtitle timing follows the Japanese speech segments, so where a cue is too long to read in time, split it in two in the SRT. In the dub, English often fits easily, because each line only has to match the time the Japanese speaker took. Each person keeps a copy of their own voice, speaking English.

Interviews and panels with several people work too: up to 8 speakers are told apart and voiced separately, though quick back-and-forth aizuchi can land in the wrong voice.

Video you own or have rights to

Translate recordings you made, your company's footage, or content you have permission to use. Anime, TV dramas and films belong to their rights holders, and dubbing them, even for personal sharing, is usually not allowed. Music and sung parts are removed with the speech in a dub, which makes the format a poor fit for that kind of material anyway. Translating someone else's video legally covers permissions in more detail.

Costed examples

Cost: 900 credits (90¢) for the English dub, which includes the subtitles and both transcripts, or 18 credits (1.8¢) for English subtitles and transcripts without a voice.

Cost: 1,250 credits ($1.25) for the English dub, which includes the subtitles and both transcripts, or 25 credits (2.5¢) for English subtitles and transcripts without a voice.

Cost: 800 credits (80¢) for the English dub, which includes the subtitles and both transcripts, or 16 credits (1.6¢) for English subtitles and transcripts without a voice.

Using the tool on this page

• The spoken language is detected automatically; you select the output language — the spoken language itself for an untranslated transcript, or another language for a translation. Files can be up to 2 hours long.
• Only the audio is sent for processing — the video stays on your device — and audio and text are deleted within 30 minutes of delivery (how files are protected).
• You can download a translated video that keeps your music and effects, the translated audio as M4A, a transcript and subtitles (SRT and VTT). Every output, step and limit is explained on the video translator page.