Spanish Captions for Shorts

The Shorts feed is a muted, autoplaying, thumb-driven surface. A Spanish-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 Spanish text moving in time with the speech gives the eye something to track — a reason to stay through the setup and reach the payoff.

Spanish runs at nearly eight syllables a second, so Spanish short-form captions need shorter word groups than English — three words a card, cut on the pause — with the opening ¿ and ¡ in place so the line reads as Spanish at a glance.

The transcription is the same one behind the Spanish subtitle generator: the model transcribes the Spanish audio, adds the opening ¿ and ¡ that Spanish punctuation requires, and splits lines at a reading speed that keeps up with fast speech. 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.