Templates
Bengali subtitle & caption generator
Bengali captions can be in বাংলা, in Roman letters, or translated into English. Every template below is previewed with Bengali words, so you can check its headstroke, vowel signs and stacked letters before deciding.
No Bengali templates have been published yet. Any template in the full gallery can still caption Bengali: letters its own font cannot draw come from the Bengali fallback face.
Captioning in Bengali
Bengali crams a great deal into a short line. There is a headline, vowel signs on either side of a consonant, and consonant clusters stacked vertically, and these shapes govern how a caption is set. The other big decision stems from the mismatch between Bengali spelling and Bengali speech, and it affects any romanised version.
Matra, vowel signs and clusters
The matra is Bengali's top line, similar to the one in Devanagari, and most letters hang from it. Some letters only carry a piece of it, and a few carry none, so a word's upper edge can have breaks. ি, ে and ৈ are placed in front of the consonant although they are pronounced after it. ো and ৌ are split in two, with one part on each side of the consonant (কো is an example).
Clusters pile up even more. In many conjuncts one consonant sits on top of the other, and a few, such as জ্ঞ, have a form of their own. Following a consonant, য becomes the ya-phala, fixed to the consonant's right-hand side, as in ব্যস্ত. ু, ূ and ৃ sit underneath.
Bengali fonts, and a fallback that isn't Baloo
When a template's font can't draw an Indian script, Captionwale usually turns to a Baloo face. Bengali is the exception, falling back to Noto Sans Bengali, loaded in bold weights. If you like Baloo's rounded style, Baloo Da 2, its Bengali member, is still available in the font list. All ten Bengali faces:
- Four sans-serifs: Noto Sans Bengali, Hind Siliguri, Anek Bangla, Mina.
- Two serifs: Tiro Bangla and Noto Serif Bengali.
- Three display faces: Galada, Atma, Baloo Da 2.
- Alkatra, available for Odia and Devanagari as well, which lets a channel that posts in both Hindi and Bengali use the same design.
Romanising, translating and the inherent vowel
The vowel built into each Bengali consonant sounds nearer to o, yet transliteration normally writes a. That is how রবীন্দ্রনাথ became Rabindranath in English even though Robindronath is closer to the sound, and why কথা is both katha and kotha depending on who wrote it. Check which convention a romanised transcript follows before correcting it, and settle on what your viewers expect.
For readers of Bengali script the issue never arises. Selecting the script also limits Family to Bengali faces; a link at the bottom brings back the others.
Translation raises a different problem. Bengali doesn't mark gender in সে or তিনি, but English must say he or she, and when the clip offers no clue the translation may guess wrong. Check every pronoun in a translated transcript before export.
Digits, full stops and spelling
Bengali writes numbers with its own digits, and ৪, meaning four, is easily mistaken for a Latin 8. Compare any price, date or phone number in a caption with what was said, and switch to Latin digits if your audience is more used to them.
A Bengali sentence closes with the dari (।). Replace full stops with it wherever they turn up in a Bengali-script transcript. A few verbs have two spellings in everyday use, such as হল and হলো; make them consistent in the transcript.
Questions
Why isn't Bengali drawn in a Baloo font by default?
Its fallback face is Noto Sans Bengali. Baloo Da 2 remains one of the ten Bengali options if you want it.
In romanised Bengali, is it a or o?
Either is acceptable. Katha follows the letters and kotha follows the sound; use whichever your viewers are used to.