Translate subtitles to Finnish

Usually. In our test, Finnish translations came out about the same length as the English overall. Each subtitle keeps its time and gets two lines at most, but Finnish packs a lot into single words, which a line never splits.

Lines aim for 42 characters, read at about 17 characters a second. A word such as “maailmanperintökohteeksi” (as a World Heritage site) takes over half a line by itself, so a subtitle with two or three of them may run a little long; shorten the wording if it looks crowded.

Both, which is worth tidying. One request came back with sinä (“Voitko lähettää minulle raportin?”), while “you know” became “tiedättehän” and “Please sit down, sir” “Istukaa alas, herra”, both in the plural, polite form. Choose one form for your viewers and make the file consistent.

They take Finnish case endings, as Finnish requires. In our test, Fred became “Fredin”, Oahu “Oahu'lla” and the Grand Prix “Grand Prix'n”, some of them with an apostrophe before the ending. Check that the name itself, before the ending, is spelled right.

Titles may be written out: “Dr. Patel” became “Tohtori Patel”. Finnish hän means both he and she, so “Our doctor said she would call” turned into “Lääkärimme sanoi, että hän soittaa”, with nothing to fix.

Written, standard Finnish: “minulle”, not the spoken “mulle”. That suits most subtitles. A casual vlog whose speakers use puhekieli may want a few lines loosened by hand. In our test, translation into Finnish scored above the dedicated translation system we compared it with.

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