You have a Korean, Japanese, Chinese or any other video with no subtitles at all, and you want to watch it in English. Here is the order to try things in, from best quality to fully automatic.
1. Look for existing subtitles first
For popular films and shows, someone has often already made subtitles, and human fan subtitles are usually better than any machine. Search the exact title and episode with our subtitle search (OpenSubtitles and SubDL at once). Pick the one that matches your release, or fix the timing afterwards.
2. Check what kind of text the video has
- Nothing on screen, only speech: you need speech recognition (step 3).
- Subtitles in another language burned into the picture (for example Chinese characters at the bottom): you need OCR, which reads the text on screen. See translate hardcoded subtitles.
3. Make subtitles from the speech, then translate
The automatic route is two steps: turn the spoken words into timed text in the original language, then translate that text to English while keeping the timings.
With SubtitleVideo it is one form: upload the video, pick the spoken language, choose English under “translate to”, and download an English SRT that matches your file. Details on the add English subtitles page. You get free minutes when you verify your email, then you pay per minute, no subscription.
Doing it yourself is possible too: Whisper on a computer with a good GPU, then a subtitle translator.
4. Read it once
Machine subtitles are very good on clear speech and weaker on:
- music or noise over the voices,
- several people talking at once,
- names, slang and very fast speech.
Skim the file and fix what matters in the online subtitle editor before you watch or share.
Picking the wrong spoken language is the classic mistake
If the result looks like nonsense, check that the spoken language was set correctly. Auto detection works for most videos, but a video that starts with music or another language can confuse it.