Amharic and English subtitles for a church video or talk
Upload an Amharic video and get bilingual subtitles: each one shows the Amharic line in Ethiopic (Fidel) script with its English translation underneath. You also get an Amharic-only SRT. A video of up to 15 minutes is free in full; for a longer one the first part is free on screen and the whole video is $5, up to 6 hours.
- Bilingual output: Amharic above, English below, in every subtitle
- Amharic written in Ethiopic script as Unicode, never in Latin letters
- SRT and VTT, plus a separate Amharic-only SRT
- Long services and conferences up to 6 hours for $5
- The player needs a font with Ethiopic characters
Why churches ask for both languages
An Ethiopian congregation abroad often has two audiences for the same video. Elders want to read the Amharic as it was preached. Young people raised in English, and visitors, need the English. Bilingual subtitles serve both on one screen, so the church can post one video instead of two.
This page preselects Amharic as the spoken language, English as the subtitle language and Bilingual as the output. If you only want English on screen, switch the output to Translated before you start.
Liturgy, sermon and song
In an Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo service much of the liturgy is chanted in Ge’ez, the old liturgical language, while the sermon is usually in Amharic. Ge’ez is not in the language list, so chanted passages may be marked [inaudible] or written inaccurately. Singing with instruments is harder than speech for any speech model. If you can, trim the video to the teaching, or see how the chant comes out in the free part first.
Tigrinya has its own entry in the spoken-language list. For a Tigrinya sermon, pick Tigrinya instead of Amharic, and the subtitles show Tigrinya above English.
Showing Ethiopic subtitles on a screen
- The files are UTF-8 with a byte order mark, which most players read as Unicode text
- Current phones, computers and VLC have Ethiopic fonts; some older TVs and set-top boxes do not and show empty boxes
- If a TV shows boxes, play the video from a computer in VLC, or upload it to YouTube with the SRT
- Two-language subtitles take more room, so check that they do not cover text shown in the video
Limits worth knowing
Timings are written from the AI listening, so they are close to the speech but not frame-exact. Names of saints, churches and places can be misheard, and scripture references are written as they were said. The English is an AI translation to help viewers follow, not a sworn translation. Amharic recognition is less established than for the largest languages, and an echoing hall adds mistakes, which is why the free part is worth reading before you pay.
How the tool works, what it costs and how your files are handled is on the Video to Translated Subtitles page; prices for every tool are on the pricing page.
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Questions and answers
Can ChatGPT make Amharic and English subtitles for a long video?
For a short clip it may get close. For an hour-long service it usually runs into the audio length limit and the reply length, and it cannot time hundreds of subtitles reliably across the whole video.
How much is a 2-hour church service?
One payment of $5 covers any video up to 6 hours. Up to 15 minutes is free in full. A church posting every week may prefer Unlimited at $19 a week, up to 12 hours per video.
Can the Amharic be in Latin letters?
No. Amharic is written in Ethiopic script. The English line is there for viewers who do not read Fidel.
Can I upload from Google Drive?
Yes. Paste a public Google Drive, Dropbox or direct file link instead of uploading. YouTube links are not accepted.
Who sees our video?
Only the person who uploaded it. It is sent to an AI model provider only to be processed and is not used to train models; you can delete the job at any time.