English to Japanese video translator

In short lines. A Japanese subtitle has at most 2 lines of about 16 characters, and stays up long enough to read at 9 characters a second. Japanese uses about half as many characters as English, but on screen it needs about a fifth more room.

Because the Japanese is laid out after it’s translated, its subtitles follow its own sentences, and needn’t match the English ones one for one. Each still appears while the English it translates is being spoken.

No. Japanese has no spaces, so the page asks the browser where its words begin and breaks only there, never in front of 。 or 、. In our check, the sentence about Dr. Patel and Maria Lopez became two subtitles with the names whole: “Dr. PatelとMaria Lopezが”, then “セッションを進行します。”.

Dates are worth a glance: the same check put “会議は2026年10月16” on one line and “日午後3時30分からです。” under it. Moving the 16 down a line in the SRT fixes that without touching the timing.

They read politely, in です/ます forms, which suits tutorials, product videos and company channels. A casual vlog may sound stiff that way; changing the endings to plain forms in the SRT gives a friendlier voice without touching the timing.

In our test of 50 sentences, translation into Japanese scored clearly above the dedicated translation system we compared it with. Read the names and verb endings once before you upload.

On your Mac, NoteOwl understands Japanese as well as English. Import an MP4 and it writes an unlimited transcript, puts a name to each voice and exports SRT subtitles carrying those names. Got subtitles already? Their timing stays exact in the subtitle translator.