How to translate a video to Arabic with AI dubbing, in a Gulf voice or the speaker's own

Subtitles ask your audience to read; a dub lets them listen. If you need to translate video to Arabic for viewers in the Gulf, a dub in a natural Gulf voice reaches people who would never sit through a subtitled clip, on a phone, with the sound on. nutq Studio does it in one button: it hears the speech, translates it, speaks it again in Arabic and lays every line where the original was said, with Arabic captions to match. It works the other way too, for Gulf creators who want their videos in English.

What does AI dubbing actually do?

Dub runs four steps, and the panel shows each one as it goes:

1. Listening. The speech is transcribed and timed. If the video already has captions, Studio uses them and only transcribes what is missing.
2. Translating. Lines said close together are joined into the units a speaker would say in one breath, up to about 12 seconds each. Each unit is translated against the time it had, so the translation is written to fit.
3. Voicing. Each unit is spoken in the new language at a pace that fits its slot.
4. Placing. The new voice lands on its own lane where the original was said, the original sound is turned down or off, and captions in the new language follow the new voice.

All of it arrives as one edit, so a single undo removes the dub if you change your mind.

How do you translate a video to Arabic, step by step?

1. Open the video in Studio. Drop an MP4, MOV or WebM of up to 1 GB on the Arabic captions page and sign in; it opens on the Studio timeline.
2. Choose Dub. Leave From on Detect, or name the spoken language. Set To to Arabic.
3. Pick the voice. One of the Gulf voices, or Speaker's voice to keep the original speaker's sound.
4. Decide on the original sound. Quiet keeps it faintly underneath, which suits interviews; Off removes it, which suits voiceover-led videos.
5. Check the estimate under the button, then press Dub video.
6. Review and export. Play it through, fix any caption, then export an MP4 with the Arabic captions burned in, or download them as SRT.

Gulf voice or the speaker's own?

Speaker's voice needs one clear stretch of the speaker talking on their own. If the video has music under every line or several people talking over each other, Studio says so and asks you to pick a voice instead. You can hear every Gulf voice in the voice library first.

Which languages can you dub from and into?

The original can be in any of the 14 languages nutq transcribes, including English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Chinese, detected per video. You can dub into Arabic, English (US or UK), French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Japanese or Chinese. The Arabic voices clone; the others are trained voices.

So an English product demo can become a Gulf Arabic one, and an Emirati founder's Arabic talk can be dubbed into English for investors abroad, both from the same panel.

How do you get a natural-sounding dub?

• Fix the captions first. The dub is translated from the captions, so a misheard name becomes a mistranslated name. Correct it in the captions lane before you press Dub.
• Clean audio wins. One speaker at a time, little music underneath, and a decent microphone give the best transcription and the best speaker clone.
• Short sentences translate better. A speaker who pauses between ideas gives Studio natural places to cut.
• Expect Arabic to need room. If a line comes out rushed, shorten the source caption slightly; the translation follows it.
• Some lines are skipped on purpose. nutq will not speak profanity or abuse, so such lines are left out and the panel tells you how many.

For subtitles without a dub, see how to add Arabic subtitles to a video automatically.

What does it cost?

The estimate appears under the button before you start. Listening is billed as transcription at $0.15 per hour, the new voice as speech at $0.05 per 1,000 characters, plus a small translation charge. Five minutes of speech comes to roughly 25 cents. If a step fails, only the finished steps are charged.

New accounts start with $5 of credit at sign-up, with no card. Publishing dubbed videos commercially is covered by the monthly plans, which include a commercial licence. To make your own Arabic voiceover from a script instead of dubbing, see Arabic text to speech with voice cloning.