Translate an SRT or VTT subtitle file to Arabic in your browser, with every cue keeping its original start and end time. Chrome’s built-in translator does the work on your own device (Chrome 138 or later), so the dialogue is not sent to a translation service. Arabic subtitles read right to left, and neither SRT nor VTT has a setting for that: players work out the direction from the Arabic letters themselves. In most players, lines that are entirely Arabic display correctly. Lines that mix scripts, such as a cue that opens with an English name or a brand, are the ones that can show punctuation on the wrong side.
How it works
- Open the page in Chrome 138 or later and drop your .srt or .vtt. Arabic is already the target; the source language is detected from the first five cues, or you can set it under From.
- Press Translate & download. If Chrome does not have its Arabic language pack yet, it downloads it first, with a progress bar, then translates the file cue by cue.
- Play the result and look at lines that mix Arabic with Latin letters or digits. To fix one, drop the file back in, switch to Convert, edit the line in the cue table and download it again as SRT or VTT.
Questions
- How do I translate an SRT file to Arabic?
- Drop the .srt on this page in Chrome 138 or later and press Translate & download. You do not need to say what language it is in; the first few cues are used to detect it. The download is an .srt with the same cues at the same times, in Arabic, named after the original with -translated added and ready to load next to the video.
- Why is the punctuation on the wrong side of my Arabic subtitles?
- Because that line is being laid out left to right. Most players take a line’s direction from its first letter, so a cue that opens with an English name or a Latin abbreviation is treated as left-to-right, and its full stop or question mark lands at the right-hand end. Pasting a right-to-left mark (U+200F, invisible on screen) at the start of the line usually fixes it.
- Is machine translation into Arabic good enough to publish?
- Use it as a first draft. Arabic marks gender in the word for you and in the verbs that go with it, and an English line rarely says which one it needs; with each cue translated on its own, the translator guesses line by line. Sentences split across two cues are translated as two fragments too. A fluent reader should check it against the video before release.
- Does my file get uploaded?
- No. The models and all processing run inside your browser on your own device. You can verify this yourself: open your browser’s DevTools, watch the Network tab, and process a file: there are no uploads. After the first visit most tools also work fully offline.
- What is a two-point resync?
- A fixed shift fixes subtitles that are uniformly early or late, but not ones that drift further out over the runtime (a frame-rate mismatch). Pin the first and last line to their correct moments and every cue between them is stretched linearly. That is the standard fix, done locally.
- How does on-device translation work?
- Recent Chromium browsers ship a built-in translator that downloads language packs and runs locally. Where your browser offers it, this tool uses it, subtitle text included, and nothing is sent to a service. Where it does not, the page says so instead of quietly uploading.
- Burned-in vs a subtitle file: which do I want?
- A separate .srt/.vtt can be toggled and edited, and players render it crisply, so prefer it where you control playback. Burn-in re-encodes the video with the text drawn into the frames: it plays everywhere and cannot be turned off.