Chinese to English
Mandarin is one of the languages where getting the transcript right matters most before you translate: no word spacing, heavy homophony, and terms that only disambiguate from context. ScribeToAny transcribes the Chinese first, with punctuation, sentence breaks and speaker labels, and only then translates — so the English is built on a clean source rather than on a guess. Both documents keep the same cue times, so the subtitles stay usable.
- 134+ Translation languages
- AI transcription
- Encrypted; we never train AI on your files
Start with your recording
Drop an audio or video file here, or click to choose.
Already have subtitles? Translate them here
Upload an SRT, VTT, ASS or other subtitle file, translate it into 134+ languages with Google Translate, and download it with the original timings.
What you get: a real transcript
Unedited output from a 64-second interview with two speakers (synthetic voices), transcribed with speaker detection on. Only the first lines are shown.
SPEAKER_00 (0:00) Welcome back to Small Shop Stories. SPEAKER_00 (0:02) Today I'm talking to Maya, who runs a tiny bakery on the SPEAKER_00 (0:05) corner of Mill Street. SPEAKER_01 (0:07) Thanks for having me. SPEAKER_01 (0:08) It's really small, just two ovens and a counter. SPEAKER_00 (0:12) So how does a normal day start for you?
1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,680 [SPEAKER_00] Welcome back to Small Shop Stories. 2 00:00:02,160 --> 00:00:05,320 [SPEAKER_00] Today I'm talking to Maya, who runs a tiny bakery on the 3 00:00:05,320 --> 00:00:06,320 [SPEAKER_00] corner of Mill Street.
Checked against the script, 4 of 189 words differed — a 2.1% word error rate, counting "80" written for "eighty" as an error — and all 14 speaker turns were labelled correctly. This was clean speech; noisy recordings and people talking over each other score lower. See the full transcript and how it was scored
How it works
- 1
Upload
Drop in an audio or video file, or paste a link. All common formats are accepted.
- 2
Transcribe
AI transcribes with timestamps and optional speaker labels, usually in minutes.
- 3
Translate
Open the transcript in Google Translate for any of 134+ languages, with every timestamp kept, or tick “Transcribe to English” before you start.
Why ScribeToAny
- Built for Mandarin: transcribes the Chinese first, then translates, so homophones are resolved in a checkable source text.
- Idioms (成语) and industry jargon are translated by Google Translate — review key phrases in the English before publishing.
- Provides side-by-side Chinese transcript and English translation for effortless bilingual verification.
Frequently asked questions
Does it handle Simplified and Traditional Chinese?
Yes, and they are offered as separate targets when you translate, because a single "Chinese" option would silently pick one script for you. Transcription of spoken Mandarin works the same either way; the script only matters for the written output.
What about dialects and accented Mandarin?
Accented Mandarin is handled well; regional dialects that differ substantially from Mandarin are much weaker, as they are for every speech model. For difficult recordings, accurate mode plus the optional AI audio restoration is the combination that helps most, and every segment is editable afterwards.
Can I export a bilingual document?
The Chinese transcript and the English translation export separately, in any of the eight formats, with identical cue times. Select both in the advanced export and they come down as one ZIP — the usual way to hand a client the Word document and the subtitle files together.
Transcribe to English or Translate — which gives better English from Chinese?
They work differently. Transcribe to English has the speech model write English directly in one pass — fast, but you never see the Chinese it heard. Transcribing in Chinese first and then using Translate lets you correct the Chinese transcript before it's translated, so recognition errors don't carry into the English, and you keep both versions with the same timings. For anything you'll publish or quote, the second route is easier to check.
Does it work for Cantonese?
Not reliably. Recognition is strongest on Mandarin; Cantonese recordings are often transcribed poorly or as Mandarin-style text, which then carries into the English. For Cantonese audio, check the results carefully before relying on them.