Translate subtitles to Thai

About a tenth more than English. Thai uses slightly fewer characters than English, but its lines hold 35 rather than 42. In our check of ten translated sentences, five fit on one line and five took two; a subtitle never gets a third.

Thai leaves no spaces between words, so the page breaks a line where the browser’s Thai word list finds a boundary, or at a space between phrases: “คุณส่งรายงานให้ฉัน” on top, “ก่อนวันศุกร์ได้ไหม?” below.

Where a polite particle appears, like a man. “Please sit down, sir” became “กรุณานั่งลงครับ”, ending in ครับ, which men say. If the speaker on screen is a woman, change it to ค่ะ, and search the file for ครับ to catch every line.

“You” came back as คุณ, the polite everyday form, and “Our doctor said she…” became “คุณหมอบอกว่า…”, with no pronoun at all, so the rest of the Thai reads the same for any speaker.

Most of it goes. The Thai dropped every full stop, and commas became spaces: “Well, you know, it’s kind of a big deal” came back as “เอ่อ คุณรู้ไหม มันเป็นเรื่องใหญ่พอสมควร”. Question and exclamation marks stayed, which some Thai subtitle styles leave out.

Thai is one of the languages NoteOwl understands on a Mac: it transcribes Thai recordings with unlimited transcription, tells the speakers apart and saves SRT subtitles with their names. For subtitles of Thai speech without translating, use the Thai subtitle generator.