Fix Accents in Spanish, French and German Captions

How each language breaks

The table lists what you see when a UTF-8 file is decoded as Windows-1252, the most common mismatch on Windows.

A simple pattern helps you recognize the problem: a capital "Ã" or "Â" followed by one odd character is the signature of UTF-8 read as Windows-1252.

Why English captions rarely show this

English uses mostly plain ASCII letters, and ASCII bytes are the same in UTF-8 and Windows-1252. That is why English-only creators rarely meet the problem, while a single "café", "naïve" or a curly apostrophe can break a file. Typographic quotes and dashes are non-ASCII too, so even English text can show "’" instead of an apostrophe when the encoding is wrong.

Language specific traps

Spanish

• Opening marks ¿ and ¡ are easy to lose in exports that strip non-ASCII characters.
• Names with ñ (Peña, Muñoz) are where recognition and encoding errors both show up.
• Check the rendered caption, not only the file, because fonts in some caption packs lack ñ.

French

• Accents carry meaning (a vs à, ou vs où), so a dropped accent changes the sentence.
• Elision and apostrophes: curly apostrophes are non-ASCII and often break first.
• French typography puts a space before ? ! : ; in print. Caption styles differ; pick one and apply it to all lines.

German

• Umlauts can be written as ae, oe, ue when a system cannot show them. Speech recognition output uses the real letters; do not replace them.
• Compound words are long, and a 42 character line limit forces breaks in awkward places. Use shorter captions rather than shrinking the font.
• ß is rendered differently across fonts; test the final video.

The repair, step by step

1. Keep an untouched copy of the broken file.
2. Open the copy in an editor that lets you choose the encoding (Notepad++, VS Code, TextEdit with the encoding option).
3. If you see "Ã" patterns, the file is UTF-8 shown wrongly: reopen it as UTF-8.
4. If you see "�" or "?", the file was probably saved in Windows-1252 or lost its letters: reopen as Windows-1252, check the text, then save as UTF-8.
5. Re-import into your editor and watch the captions with sound.

The free SRT encoding fixer automates steps 2 to 4 in your browser, and the file is not uploaded. Read the full mechanism in SRT encoding explained.

Generate it right the first time

A clean workflow avoids the repair entirely:

1. Transcribe with TooLongToListen; the speech model detects the language automatically.
2. Download the SRT, which is exported in UTF-8.
3. Import into your editor. For CapCut, follow how to import an SRT file into CapCut.

We are a Portuguese first product, so the accent handling is tested most for Portuguese. For Spanish, French and German the encoding is the same, but you should review proper nouns and specialized terms, as with every automatic transcript.

Quick checklist for multilingual creators

• Save and open every subtitle file as UTF-8.
• Use a font that covers the Latin Extended range.
• Test one caption with each special character before a long edit.
• Do not paste text through tools that convert to ASCII.
• Keep a master SRT per language; never overwrite it with an ANSI copy.

Try it on your own clip

Run a short file through the SRT generator. The free plan covers 10 minutes at sign-up, with no card.

Sources

• RFC 3629, UTF-8: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3629
• CapCut help center, how to import subtitles (UTF-8 requirement): https://www.capcut.com/help/how-to-import-subtitles
• Unicode Consortium, character code charts: https://www.unicode.org/charts/