German subtitle generator

A language that is guessed can drift on a quiet or accented passage, and the result is a cue in the wrong language under German speech. Fixed to German, every subtitle is written in German, start to finish.

Where speakers change language for long passages, German and English in a conference talk say, use the main subtitle generator instead: it decides the language of each passage itself.

Abbreviations with full stops, such as “v. Chr.” and “z. B.”. The generator keeps an abbreviation inside its sentence, so in our test “Im 3. Jahrhundert v. Chr. von den Ägyptern” stayed on one line.

Join such a pair in a text editor, or leave it if the timing reads well. Ordinal dates came through fine: “Am 15. August 1940 fielen die / Alliierten in Südfrankreich ein.”

With a hyphen and no space before each speaker’s line, “-Tut mir leid, dass ich zu spät bin.” over “-Schon gut.”, in Netflix’s German style guide. The generator adds no such marks; it writes the spoken words only.

The same guide writes one to twelve in words, puts a space before % (“14 %”, where our test wrote “20%”) and a full stop in five-digit figures such as “30.000”. Its line and speed limits match this page: 42 characters and 17 a second.

NoteOwl understands German on your Mac: it transcribes German recordings there with unlimited transcription, recognises who is speaking and saves SRT subtitles that start with each name. For a transcript instead of subtitles, use German audio to text.