Caption languages and translation

Reeltopus transcribes and captions videos in many languages. This article covers which languages are supported, how the language is chosen and how to get captions in another language.

Supported languages

Captions work in 109 languages. For each one, Reeltopus:

• Transcribes the speech with timing for every word
• Picks clips and writes titles and hooks in that language
• Breaks caption lines the way the language is written
• Draws the captions with a font that has its letters

That includes languages written right to left, like Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu, and languages written without spaces between words, like Chinese, Japanese and Thai.

The full list is on the languages page.

Accuracy varies by language

Transcription is very accurate in widely spoken languages and less so in others. Whatever the language, check names, brands and technical terms. Fixing a word once fixes it in every clip. See Fix the transcript.

Choosing the spoken language

When you upload a file or paste a YouTube link, the Spoken language menu is set to Detect automatically. Reeltopus works out the language for you.

You can also pick the language yourself. Do this for the few languages that automatic detection doesn't recognize, since those are only transcribed when you choose them.

For some languages, a second menu appears to choose the script the captions are written in. For example, the language's own script or Latin letters.

The language is set per video, before you upload. To change it afterwards, upload the video again with the right language picked.

Videos with more than one language

Pick the language most of the video is in, or leave it on Detect automatically. Captions follow the transcript, so check the parts in the other language and fix words where needed.

Captions in another language

Translated captions come with a dub. When you dub a clip, Reeltopus translates the speech, records it in a new voice and makes captions in the new language. The dub is a new copy of the clip, so the original keeps its captions.

There isn't a way to translate captions without dubbing the audio. See Dub a clip into another language for languages, voices and how it's charged.

Caption files

You can download a clip's captions as a file to upload to a platform or use in another editor. In the Export & post tab, next to Caption file, pick:

The file follows the caption style you've picked. For a dubbed clip, the file has the translated captions.

Fonts and other scripts

Caption styles use their own fonts. If a style's font doesn't have the letters for a language, those letters are drawn with a matching Noto font, so nothing shows up as empty boxes. The same applies to a font you upload to a brand kit. See Caption styles and brand kits.