How to Translate Arabic Audio to English Text

Inside the app, after you create a free account, open Advanced options, set Language to Arabic and Output to "Translate to English": the Arabic speech comes back as English text in one step. It is machine translation, so treat it as a draft, and English is the only target. The option is not in the no-account upload box.

Steps

1. Create a free account and sign in. The option is not in the no-account upload box.
2. Upload the audio or video inside the app and open Advanced options.
3. Set Language to Arabic.
4. Set Output to Translate to English instead of "Same language".
5. Choose the small model (or leave Auto), then start.
6. Read the English draft against the audio, or have someone who understands Arabic check it, then download TXT or SRT.

What is happening underneath

Whisper-family models have a translate task that outputs English from speech in another language. OpenAI's Whisper README says: "To translate speech into English, use" --task translate in its example. It also says the turbo model is not trained for translation and returns the original language even when translation is requested. Ordinary accounts on our hosted site are offered the tiny, base and small models, so you will not meet turbo there; if you run Whisper yourself, choose another size for translation.

What it cannot do

• Only English. There is no option to translate into another language.
• You do not also get the Arabic text. The setting gives English only. For both languages, run the file twice, once as Same language and once as Translate to English; each run uses your minutes.
• No quality guarantee. We have not measured translation quality and make no claim about it. Names, numbers, idioms, jokes and dialect words are where translations go wrong.
• Dialects. If the model does not recognise a colloquial word, it translates what it thinks it heard, not what the speaker meant. See how to transcribe Arabic dialects.

How to check the English

1. Read the draft once without the audio and mark every sentence that sounds odd, however fluent it is.
2. Play the matching Arabic and compare each marked sentence; if you do not read Arabic, ask someone who does to check them.
3. Check every name, number, date and amount against the audio, since a translation can drop or reorder them.
4. Search for any term that must be consistent, such as a product or place name, and fix it everywhere in one pass.

English subtitles for an Arabic video

When the job finishes, download SRT as usual and check the timing against the video as you would for any subtitle file. To add it on YouTube, follow the SRT guide and pick English as the file's language; YouTube's own steps are in its help page, which we read on 2026-10-26: YouTube Help, add subtitles and captions.

Translate in two steps instead?

You can also transcribe the Arabic first, correct it, and then translate the corrected text with a separate text-translation tool. That costs more time but means the translator works from a text you have already checked. We do not offer text translation of transcripts, so that second step is outside this site.

When you need a human translator

If the English will be published under your name, or carries a legal, financial or medical commitment, have a translator or a bilingual reader check it against the audio.