Translate subtitles to Chinese

Yes. Chinese takes about a third as many characters as the English it translates, and even with lines of 16 characters it needs about a fifth less room on screen. In our check, seven of ten translated test sentences fit on a single line.

The three that took two lines held the price, the date and the two names: every digit, space and Latin letter counts as a character too. Each subtitle still keeps its original time, so viewers simply get less to read in it.

Simplified characters, the standard in mainland China and Singapore: the page asks for simplified Chinese and checks that every reply is written in Chinese characters. For viewers in Taiwan or Hong Kong, convert the file to traditional characters and check words that differ by region.

As 你, the everyday form. “Can you send me the report before Friday?” became “你能在周五之前把报告发给我吗？”, and none of the 50 sentences in our larger test used 您. For a formal talk or a company message, change 你 to 您 where respect matters.

“Please sit down, sir.” came back as “请坐，先生。”: polite through 请 and 先生 rather than through the pronoun.

Sometimes. In our short test, “Dr. Patel 和 Maria Lopez” stayed in Latin letters, which can split across two lines. In a longer test, well-known names were written in characters, such as 拉奥尼奇 for Raonic. Decide which your viewers expect and make the file consistent.

NoteOwl understands Chinese on your Mac: it transcribes Mandarin recordings with unlimited transcription, labels each speaker and saves SRT subtitles with their names. For subtitles of Mandarin speech straight from a video, use the Chinese subtitle generator.