German Captions for Shorts

The Shorts feed is a muted, autoplaying, thumb-driven surface. A German-speaking viewer lands mid-sentence and gives the video about a second. Sound is off by default and often stays off for the whole session, so on-screen text is the primary channel, not a secondary one — the hook has to be readable before it is audible.

YouTube's auto-generated captions for Shorts are a subtitle track: hidden behind a button, rendered in YouTube's style, and unreliable for many languages. Captions burned into the frame are in your font and colour, sit where you put them, and are there whether or not anyone taps CC — and they survive when the clip is downloaded and reposted to Reels or TikTok.

They also carry the middle. Retention on a Short falls off in the first few seconds, and German text moving in time with the speech gives the eye something to track — a reason to stay through the setup and reach the payoff.

German compounds and long verbs at the end of the clause mean German short-form captions are grouped by measured width rather than a fixed word count, and never break a word across two cards.

The transcription is the same one behind the German subtitle generator: the model transcribes the German audio, capitalises nouns correctly, and breaks lines at clause boundaries rather than mid-compound. For Shorts, the result is then split into three- or four-word cards and rendered with a font that has the full Latin character set, so nothing falls back to a box or a smudge at phone size.