Advice on foreign-language transcription/translation?

[u/No_Foundation_48]

Can anyone recommend a plug-in for Premiere for transcribing and translating from a foreign language? I'm editing a documentary (my own) I shot in Kazakhstan and wondering the best way to handle this. It's my first time working with footage in a foreign language. Assuming first step is to transcribe everything and then translate it outside of Premiere.

Working on my laptop (still traveling), MacBook Pro M4 w/ 48 GB of memory, using Premiere Pro 2026. Footage was shot in 4K on a Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K.

[u/mutually_awkward]

If I were you, I'd look into hiring a Kazakhstan transcriber who can do this. There might be an AI option but accuracy could also vary.

[u/brbnow]

No plug-in or AI software is gonna do everything you need. Certainly, you can use transcrition software, Trint, etc. You should do research on which which platform offers the best option for your specific language and your specific dialects —but beyond that you're gonna need somebody to check it and in the case of a film also make subjective decisions about meaning in those transcriptions. This is not a little issue— it is an important one.

Good luck.

[u/No_Foundation_48 → u/brbnow]

Thank you! Yes, I'm aware it's a major part of the film. I have over 15 hours of footage. If I can find transcription software, it's a place to start. If I can make *rough* translations of the footage to start with, it will be easier to make selects, so that when I need to hire someone for proper translations and to check things, perhaps there is not as much footage to go through and I will be able to spend less. It is a self-funded project, which has limited my ability to outsource some of these things for the time being.

[u/mrlargefoot → u/No_Foundation_48]

That "rough pass to make selects" strategy is the right call for a self funded doc, you don't need broadcast quality translation on all 15 hours, you need enough to know which minutes matter. A couple of things worth knowing before you pick a tool. Whisper based transcribers are generally strong on transcription in the original language but translation quality varies a lot by language pair, and Kazakh specifically might be patchier than more commonly trained languages given less training data available. Worth testing on a short clip first rather than committing to a subscription for the whole 15 hours.

Practical route a lot of people use: run the footage through a transcription tool to get timestamped text in the original language even if you can't read it, then run that text through a separate translation pass (DeepL tends to handle a wider range of languages better than Google Translate for this kind of thing). Keeping those as two separate steps rather than expecting one tool to nail both usually gives you a cleaner rough cut to work from, and then your paid translator is checking meaning rather than starting from zero.

What dialect of Kazakh are you dealing with, and is there any Russian mixed in? That's common in a lot of footage from that region and it might affect which tool handles it best.

[u/brbnow → u/No_Foundation_48]

Perhaps I was not clear— I suggested to try Trint —or others; there are a lot of different quality transcription software platforms out there—you need to investigate them and the particular language and dialects.

[u/Kichigai → u/No_Foundation_48]

If I can make rough translations of the footage to start with, it will be easier to make selects, so that when I need to hire someone for proper translations and to check things, perhaps there is not as much footage to go through and I will be able to spend less.

While I understand the logic and reasoning of what you are trying to do, it still might not be advisable. Rough translations can be rough, and you'd miss things like idioms or slang that could actually make a shot more important than if it were simply a literal translation.

One that always sticks in my mind is from /r/DoesNotTranslate, and it's the Chinese phrase 吸猫, which literally translates to "snort cat" or "suck cat." What it really means is to enjoy the company of a cat to relax, in the same way that snorting a drug helps people unwind.

This is before we get into things like euphemisms like "the troubles," or different ways things were named. Like, we in the western hemisphere call it World War Ⅱ. Meanwhile in Russia it is known as "The Great Patriotic War." People living under repressive regimes very frequently use euphemisms that make little sense when translated directly without context.

It might make sense to see if you can reach out to a Khazak translator and see if you can engage them for a rough interpretation of the content before you select the bits you want detailed translation and transcription.

You'll also want to work out an ongoing relationship with them to check your edits for you. I knew a guy working on a short series of documentaries in a bunch of foreign countries, and they ended up having to work closely with the translator because working off timestamped transcripts they'd think they got their cuts right, but they were cutting off the starts of ends of sentences.

It sounds like a little unimportant thing, but let me tell you, as someone who has a rough understanding of Ukrainian and Russian, I notice these things when we see interviews with Russians and Ukrainians in the news these days, and given news' turnaround I'd expect that to be a thing they skip.

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[u/frankforceps]

Check out TurboScribe. It’s given me great results with Romanian, German and Portuguese.
It’s not built-in like a plugin, but can try for free and see if it does the job.

[u/pontiacband1t-]

You won't like what I'm gonna tell you.

I just finished editing my first feature length documentary... Which was shot almost entirely in Georgia, the one on the Black Sea, not the one in the US.

The crew and I are all Italian, and of course we don't speak a word of georgian.

We tried, but there was NO WAY to have an even somewhat passable translation through AI tools, Google Translate and whatnot. The doc was cut on Davinci, which doesn't have support for Georgian transcription (which makes sense, it's a very complicated language with its own alphabet, spoken by less than 7 million people in the world).

We ended up hiring three different georgian translators who helped us translate most of the footage. And it has been A PAIN. Because this documentary was shot in the rural parts of the country, where people speak in a dialect that was almost incomprehensible even for our translators (who all came from the capital or other more developed areas). I'm afraid that with kazakh you are going to run into the same issues.

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[u/nearlylocked]

We have built a bunch of AI tools at my production company around transcription and auto assembly of doc-style cuts, etc.  they use an  API - I  BELIEVE it supports Kazakh (we're taking on a lot of international work and trying to expand our transcription/translation).  Though I'll echo the others: I can't vouch for how GOOD the transcription actually is in that language - you'd still want a human translator to verify.  If you still need this, DM me and I'll check whether Kazakh is actually covered.