Generate subtitles for your Icelandic videos

About Icelandic transcription

Icelandic (Íslenska) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in Iceland. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Icelandic, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

Icelandic uses two letters no other living language does — þ and ð — and both are ordinary parts of words rather than decoration, so check your player renders them. It also tends to coin native words where other languages borrow, which means technical vocabulary is less predictable from English.

What an Icelandic subtitle file looks like

Four lines as they come out of the exported SRT, in the Latin alphabet with the timings taken from the speech itself.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
Takk fyrir að koma, öll sömul.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Byrjum á fyrstu spurningunni.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Skrifið spurningar ykkar hér fyrir neðan.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Það var allt fyrir í dag.

Line length in Icelandic

Icelandic welds nouns together into single long words, so a Icelandic subtitle line runs visually wider than its word count suggests.

Shorter subtitle blocks read better as a result, and splitting one across two events costs nothing — the timings come from the speech either way.

Icelandic diacritics are not optional

The marks above and below Icelandic letters change which word it is, not merely how it sounds. Stripping them — which some older subtitle tooling still does on upload — produces text that is wrong rather than plain.

Open an exported file once to confirm they survived before you trust a workflow with a batch. When they do not, the cause is almost always an encoding setting.

Searching a Icelandic transcript

Icelandic is heavily inflected, so a term appears in a range of forms rather than repeating identically the way an English transcript would. That is correct output.

It does mean searching a transcript for a keyword will miss most of its occurrences unless you search for the stem — worth knowing before you use a transcript as an index.

Getting a better Icelandic transcript

• Set the language to Icelandic rather than leaving detection on, particularly for clips under a minute where there is little audio to judge from.
• Upload the highest-quality audio you have; compression artefacts cost more accuracy than most people expect.
• Check proper nouns, place names and numbers first — recognition errors concentrate there.
• Read the transcript before exporting. Icelandic subtitles are editable up until you download them.

Icelandic subtitles in another language

The same Icelandic audio can produce subtitles in any of the 76 supported languages instead of in Icelandic itself. English is the most common target, but every pair works, and the translated file keeps the original timings so it drops onto the same video unchanged.