How To Find Turkish TV Shows And Watch Them With Subtitles
Non-Turkish speaking? No problem!
So you’re ready to jump in to the wonderful world of Turkish TV? But how do you do it, as a non-Turkish speaker? Here are the options for getting subtitles, conveniently arranged from easy to hard. Well less easy, anyway; nothing’s that difficult with the internet these days.
Streaming Services (Netflix etc.)
Streaming services like Netflix have the highest quality English subtitles, plus a heap of other languages. This is your easiest option if you have a password. Some suggested shows to watch (note I will definitely do more detailed reviews of some of these as time goes by):
Diriliş: Ertuğrul (“Resurrection: Ertuğrul”) - Available on Netflix. Of course I’m going to recommend this one; its in the title of the blog. Review here. Episodes on Netflix are conveniently split in half to match the usual Western 1-hour format, so episode numbers won’t match those on Youtube.
Bir Başkadır (English title: Ethos) - Netflix original; highly recommended. Unlike the historical dramas, this illustrates a broad cross-section of modern Turkish society.
Masum ("Innocent") - Available on Netflix. A well-plotted crime drama dealing with mental health themes. Adapted from Turkish theatre.
Youtube With Official Subtitles
This is probably easier than Netflix; but only if you can find shows to watch. Since nice human-curated subtitles are expensive and time-consuming to generate, they are as rare as rocking-horse dung. There is however one very significant exception:
Diriliş: Ertuğrul (“Resurrection: Ertuğrul”) - The first two seasons are currently available with decent English subtitles on the official Youtube channel, starting with Season 1 here.
Youtube With Official (Machine-Generated) Subtitles
When you post a video to Youtube, you can click a box to allow the Youtube speech-recognition AIs to automatically generate subtitles. Some Youtube channels take advantage of this, but you may need to pay to get long videos transcribed, so many channels don’t bother. These subtitles are surprisingly high-quality, as discussed in my very first post, and very much worth using. Sometimes the robot makes funny translation errors, which I will endeavour to blog about here so that we can all laugh at them.
At the time of writing, some new series owned by Turkish broadcasters such as TRT and ATV are starting to get automatic subtitles, but their back catalogues generally do not. There’s a wealth of content available there, but here are some recommendations:
The main page for channel ATV will suggest current shows; click through to individual channels to get the episodes (and confirm that subtitles are available)
ATV’s Destan is my current favourite Turkish show, and all episodes of season 1 are available and subtitled. You’ll have to click through to the “Videos” page, then sort by date added (oldest) to find episode 1 (or just search “Destan 1”). Review for this show definitely forthcoming. *Update* Review here.
ATV’s Kuruluş: Osman is the sequel to Diriliş: Ertuğrul, and is recommended if you liked that show and want more of the same. Maybe not as good as the original show, but I’m invested now and enjoying it.
The TRT Drama channel seems to be routinely subtitling new shows; I havent watched anything there yet but will keep an eye on it.
How to tell if a Youtube video has official subtitles: as in the picture you’ll see the word “subtitles” in a box below the video thumbnail.
To use the subtitles, you click the icon at the bottom of the video to turn them on. The first step is to click the cogwheel icon for settings, and select “Turkish” language subtitles. Note that it takes a few days after a video is posted for the speech recognition AI to generate the subtitles (and for the “Subtitles” label to appear). If this process isn’t complete, you will only see the option for “Turkish (auto-generated)” subtitles in the settings menu. DO NOT use this, its terrible (it tries to translate word by word in real time, sacrificing quality). Once you’ve selected Turkish subtitles, then click “auto-translate” to English (or your preferred language; almost any of the Google Translate-supported languages are available).
Youtube With Unofficial Subtitles
Before speech recognition machines were a thing, all subtitles had to be transcribed by humans. Youtube used to let random people contribute subtitles, but they don’t anymore. You can still use them though, you just need a browser addon to display your choice of subtitles over the top of the video. I use Substital, which is available for Firefox or Chrome. I’m sure there are other good alternatives too.
Addons like Substital work with community-contributed subtitle files, often with the .srt file extension. These are available for free from sites like opensubtitles.org or subscene.com. Addons like Substital will search these sites for you, but you can also drag and drop your own file.
User-generated stuff is variable in quality, so you might need to try a few different contributors until you find one you like. These days its easy to quickly upload a poor-quality machine-generated subtitle file, and many people will download this before the high-quality human-curated subtitles are available. This means that the file with the most downloads is not always the best. If you are looking for subs soon after a new episode is available, there might not be much choice and you should look again in a few days.
Another reason to use unofficial subtitles is that these can be much better than the official ones. As this blog will point out, Google Translate is very good but it struggles with some of the really archaic “ye olde” vocabulary that shows I like tend to use. If you start a brand new TV show, it can be a good idea to get human-generated subtitles just until you get the hang of any special new vocabulary. When Google tries to guess the meanings for these, you will know where its stupid brain is going wrong.
Heres some suggestions:
Here is a playlist of 140 Turkish movies with English subtitles (no addon needed). Quality of subtitles seems pretty good.
Kara Sevda (“Dark Love”) is a very popular modern romance/soap opera from Turkish TV channel “Star TV”. My wife and I have been watching this on-and-off and have nearly finished season 1; its fun overall with some good chemistry between the two main actors. Lots of glitz and glamour; most female characters wear high heels at all times, even when gardening. Watch the first episode and you’ll know if its your thing. I swear this used to have official English subtitles, but Youtube disappeared them sometimes in the last couple of years. Another complication is that the channel uploaded new “HD” episodes about 9 months ago, and these are actually slightly different edits in some places, so sometimes the subtitles (which were user-generated for the original edit) go out of sync at a particular point in the episode. I would recommend watching the original edit if you can (first episode and playlist here) and you’ll have the best chance of the subtitles matching up. I’m currently using subtitles by user vu trong thau for the later episodes of season 1, and they are excellent. Annoyingly, episode 25 (original edit) seems to be missing from Youtube altogether, so either pirate that episode (see below), or watch the HD edit.
ATV’s Destan (mentioned above) has some archaic vocabulary that Google/Youtube stuggles with. Better human-curated subtitles are available for the early episodes in the first season, and its recommended that you use these if you can be bothered, but the quality trails off a bit and then they stop altogether, so you’ll be using Youtube official subtitles eventually.
TRT’s Alparslan: Büyük Selçuklu is another historical drama. Its on my list to watch for a couple of reasons; firstly it features actor Barış Bağcı who played bad guy Noyan in Diriliş: Ertuğrul, and secondly it seems to put special effort in the “historical” part of historical drama. For instance the small part of Episode 1 that I’ve watched shows an old game traditionally played by fighting on horseback over the carcass of a goat (a stuffed skin is substituted for the purposes of the show) I’ve never seen this game depicted elsewhere. Subtitles here.
Its not Turkish (instead Russian) but its on a very good channel worth recommending anyway: why not watch the movie Stalker from 1979? Inspired by the book, and inspiring in its turn a popular videogame series, this is a great movie from a great director. English subs hardcoded in.
*Update Jan 2023* Several very popular recent TV shows have been on the Star TV channel. These include Yalı Çapkını and Çöp Adam. At the time of writing the episodes are not available on their Youtube page, instead you’ll have to go to their own stupid page here. The Substital addon mentioned above works on this page, if you can find a subtitle file to use. (I’m not selling it very well am I? Could be worth keeping an eye on though.)
Piracy
Once, this was the only way to access Turkish TV outside Türkiye; thankfully, the Pirate Bay and others offered such a good service that they have mostly succeeded in pressuring legal streaming services to offer a better deal. The availability of many modern Turkish series on Youtube, with pretty decent machine-generated subtitles, means people mostly don’t bother sharing them peer-to-peer any more. Whatever you think about Youtube’s monopolistic practices regarding advertising revenue etc. this is still an improvement for anyone who wants to access these shows without infringing copyright. I’ll leave the piracy option in this list though for a few reasons; its still really easy, stuff could disappear from Youtube at any time or be blocked in your country, and there are still some Turkish shows and movies you can’t easily get anywhere else (see Kara Sevda episode 25 above). Just one recommendation for now, although plenty of older/classic stuff is still seeded including Diriliş: Ertuğrul:
Şahsiyet (“Persona”) - Originally broadcast by PuhuTV. I thought the central detective/mystery/drama plot was excellent, even though some of the side-plots were never satisfactorily tied up. Imaginative and well worth watching.
Of course even if you only share copyright non-infringing material you’ll still need file sharing software (qBittorrent is a good open-source example) and a list of trackers (the Pirate Bay is the best-known). Access to the Pirate Bay is often blocked at ISP level; this is (to quote the Wikipedia article):
… despite the relative ease by which such blocks can be circumvented in most countries.
Watching downloaded TV or movie files can be done with whatever software you already use. VLC is probably the best open-source multimedia player.
Make/Fix Your Own Subtitles
OK I lied, the final option is harder than the others because it requires you to learn new skills and start contributing to the subtitles community! No need to panic though, this is something you might just become interested in over time.
For instance, lets say you find some good subtitles for your favourite show but they are majorly out of sync with the episode. You could download Subtitle Edit (open source) to fix this.
Once you’ve opened that program though you’ll find it can do all sorts of cool things; pretty up the subtitles (splitting long lines into two separate ones, fixing lines that stay onscreen for less time than it takes to read them, even fix common errors automatically). You can open a corrupted subtitle file and fix the broken line, autotranslate with Google Translate if you can’t find an English version, and so on. Next thing you know, you’re re-uploading the corrected file and helping other people!
Plenty more tips for video editing are available on the internet. Güle güle kullan!
*Update* OpenAI have released their automatic transcription robot called Whisper; it makes pretty good Turkish subtitles as discussed here:
Have you tried https://wlext.is. It has series from across the world with English subtitles. Lots of Turkish series, including most of the ones mentioned in the article.