Translate Japanese subtitles to English
Last updated September 2026
Found a video with only Japanese subtitles? You can translate the Japanese .srt or .vtt file into English right in your browser. Japanese mixes three scripts — kanji, hiragana and katakana — with no spaces between words, and subtitle lines are usually limited by character count rather than word count. The tool sends each cue's text to the on-device translation model in desktop Chrome or Edge and writes the English back with the original timing, so the new file stays in sync with the video. The file never leaves your computer.
How to do it
- Get the Japanese subtitle file as .srt or .vtt, and make sure it's saved as UTF-8 (see the tips below if the text looks garbled).
- Open the translator in desktop Chrome 138+ or Edge — the button here presets Japanese → English.
- Drop the file in. If the browser supports language detection, it will confirm the source is Japanese.
- Press Translate. The first run downloads the Japanese–English model once; later files in the same pair start immediately and work offline.
- Download the English subtitle file and load it next to your video (same file name as the video makes most players pick it up automatically).
Tips
- Japanese often omits the subject entirely, so English output may guess “I/you/he/she” wrong — dialogue between several characters needs a review.
- Honorifics like -san, -kun and -senpai are usually dropped or rendered generically; fan subtitlers often prefer to restore them.
- Machine translation is a strong first draft. For anything you'll publish, have someone fluent in Japanese spot-check names and jokes.
FAQ
Are anime honorifics like -san kept?
Usually not — the model tends to translate or drop them. If you want to keep honorifics, fix them after translation in any subtitle editor.
Is my Japanese subtitle file uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read and translated inside your browser by its built-in model. Only anonymous usage analytics are collected — never file contents.
Why does it say my browser isn't supported?
The on-device Translator API currently exists only in desktop Google Chrome 138+ and Microsoft Edge. Brave, Opera, Firefox, Safari and all mobile browsers either lack the API or the model.