Bringing in an Icelandic video
Drop in the video file unchanged: MP4, MOV, MKV, WEBM, AVI, M4V, 3GP or a phone screen recording. The sound track is pulled out on the server, so there is no convert-to-MP3 step, and every timestamp still matches the picture. If the video is online, paste its public link under Import from link: YouTube, Shorts, TikTok, public Vimeo, Dropbox or Google Drive share links, or a direct link to a video file. Only the audio is downloaded. Playlists and channels are refused, so queue videos one link at a time, and sign-in-only posts such as Instagram need to be downloaded and uploaded.
The draft opens beside a player that follows along line by line. Click a line to replay it, which is how most corrections get made: listen, fix, move on.
What to expect from Icelandic
Icelandic has far fewer speakers than its Nordic neighbours, and the speech model has seen less of it. Expect a usable draft that needs a careful read rather than a near-final text. Case endings on nouns and adjectives are the most frequent slips, along with compound words and personal names ending in -son and -dóttir.
The letters þ, ð, æ and ö and the accented vowels á, é, í, ó, ú and ý are kept. Younger speakers and tech or gaming videos often drop in English words; those may come out in English or bent into Icelandic spelling. Slow, clear narration from one speaker gives the cleanest result; fast conversation between friends gives the roughest.
Icelandic videos worth transcribing
Uploads we see:
- Recorded lectures from university courses, for notes.
- Interviews filmed for a thesis, an article or a documentary.
- Family videos with grandparents, including those recorded by Western Icelandic families in Canada.
- Your own YouTube, TikTok or Instagram clips (Instagram as an uploaded file), for Icelandic subtitles.
Subtitles in Icelandic
Export SRT or VTT once the text is corrected. Files are UTF-8, so þ and ð stay as they are in YouTube Studio, Premiere Pro and VLC. For a written record, export DOCX or PDF, with or without timestamps, or CSV with one row per line for analysis.
Getting the most from the draft
A clip-on or phone microphone close to the speaker helps more than anything else. If wind or background chatter is loud, turn on audio repair before transcribing. Speaker labels for interviews are available on paid plans and with a Minute Pack.
The transcript stays in Icelandic. For an English reading, open the Google Translate link on the transcript, or use the AI prompt export to hand the text to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. For audio-only recordings, see the Icelandic audio to text page.