Subtitles

Subtitles are on by default: most views happen with the sound off.

Note

They are not set on the Generate screen but in your brand template (Burnt-in subtitles → Customise the style), then clip by clip with the Subtitles tool of the editor. These settings can be redone as often as you like, with no new credit charge.

The six looks

Look	What it looks like
Classic	Outlined white, capitals. The safe one.
Impact	Big words, green highlight. The most visible.
Blazing	Condensed font, red highlight. For a sharp tone.
Neon	Cyan halo. On dark backgrounds only.
Boxed	Solid background behind the text, lowercase.
Plain	Thin, no effect, lowercase.

The default look is Impact.

Word by word or whole sentence

• Word by word on — each word lights up as it is spoken. This is what holds the eye in a vertical feed. The Words shown at once setting chooses how many words are visible together; three reads best.
• Word by word off — the whole sentence appears at once, like a film subtitle.

What else can be set

Next to the look:

• position — top, centre or bottom, fine-tuned with a vertical offset;
• alignment — centred or left (the right edge is taken by the apps’ own buttons);
• size, with a slider, while watching the preview;
• the font, all caps, and the colours of the text, the outline and the current word.

A field left empty follows the chosen look. The preview shows the result as it will be burnt into the clip.

Language

Subtitles are written in the language spoken in the video, detected automatically or declared on the generation screen. See Settings.

Seventeen languages are recognized, Arabic and Hebrew included: their subtitles and hooks are written right to left, in a font that covers their script. To show another language than the one spoken, see Translating subtitles.

Fixing a subtitle

An automatic transcript mostly gets proper nouns and technical vocabulary wrong. To fix it:

1. Open the clip in the editor, Subtitles tool, then Text.
2. Click a word to fix it, delete it, shift it by 0.1 s, or set its start and end separately (to stretch it).
3. Add a subtitle adds text the transcript missed, between two moments you choose.

Deleting a word removes it from the subtitles, not from the audio. To cut the passage itself, uncheck the sentence or move the clip’s bounds. Revert all undoes every fix.

A proper noun that comes back from one video to the next? Once fixed, Add to the vocabulary stores it in your brand template: it will be spelled right in the next generations.

Declaring the spoken language when you generate reduces mistakes, especially with a strong accent.

Translating subtitles

In the editor, Subtitles tab, pick Translate into: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch or Polish. The translation arrives in a few seconds, line by line, and every line can be fixed by hand.

Two displays:

• Instead of the original: only the translation shows, in the clip’s style;
• Bilingual: the original keeps its word-by-word highlight, the translation shows underneath, smaller.

Press Apply to see it in the clip. Translation is included in the Creator and Studio plans, at no credit cost, within the daily AI editing limit. It works with word-by-word (karaoke) subtitles. If you fix the original words afterwards, use Translate again.

Further reading

On the blog, in French: TikTok auto-captions, native or burned in.