Japanese subtitle generator

Because kanji are shared with Chinese, and a short or unclear stretch that is guessed could come back in another language or script. With the page set to Japanese, every subtitle is written in Japanese, in kanji, hiragana and katakana.

For a video that moves between Japanese and English, say a bilingual class, use the main subtitle generator: it identifies the language of each stretch separately.

Each kanji or kana is a full-width character, about as wide as two Latin letters, and carries a syllable or a whole word. So a line holds 16 characters rather than 42, and a subtitle stays up long enough to read about 9 a second.

In our Japanese test recording the lines averaged about 12 characters and none passed 16. Spaces, commas and full stops count as characters too, as they do in professional Japanese subtitling.

Sparingly and in half-width digits. Our 40 test clips held 22 、 and 11 。, so many subtitles end without a mark; katakana names keep their ・, as in ロランド・メンドーサ; numbers read 100%, 6000人 and 33万人, with 万 for the large ones.

Streaming services set their own house style. Netflix’s Japanese guide, for example, leaves 、 and 。 out of subtitles altogether and puts a space in their place, which you can do with find and replace in the SRT.

NoteOwl understands Japanese on your Mac: it transcribes Japanese recordings there with unlimited transcription, keeps each speaker apart and saves SRT subtitles with their names, all with on-device AI models. If you need a transcript rather than subtitles, try Japanese audio to text.