How to translate a video into Arabic and Hindi without losing the speaker's voice

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A product demo, a pitch, a training clip, whatever the video is, if it only exists in English, you're asking Arabic and Hindi speaking buyers to either struggle through it or skip it. Subtitles help a little, but most people watching on a phone don't turn sound off and read along, they just scroll past.

Dubbing fixes that by replacing the audio track with a translated version, ideally one that still sounds like the original speaker, not a flat robotic narrator. That's what makes this different from subtitles or a generic voiceover: the output is supposed to sound like your presenter actually speaks Arabic and Hindi. If you only need a new narration, see making AI voiceovers in Arabic, Hindi and English.

What are your options?

• Freelance translators plus voice actors. The highest quality option and the most expensive and slowest. You're paying for a translator, then separately for native-speaker voice talent in each language, then syncing the new audio to the video. For a handful of long-term, high-stakes videos (a flagship product launch, a legal training module), this is still the safer choice. Other tools are compared in best AI dubbing tools for training and product videos.
• Subtitles only. Free and fast, but subtitles lose a meaningful chunk of your audience, especially on mobile, and they strip out tone and emphasis entirely. Fine as a stopgap, not a real substitute for dubbed audio if the video is doing real selling.
• ElevenLabs Dubbing. AI dubbing that translates the audio while keeping the original speaker's voice characteristics and background sound. Try ElevenLabs Dubbing to see what your own video sounds like translated before committing to anything else.

What ElevenLabs Dubbing actually does

You upload a video or audio file, pick the target languages, and ElevenLabs transcribes the original, translates it, and generates new audio that keeps the original speaker's voice and the background music or ambient sound underneath it. It covers more than 90 languages, Arabic and Hindi both included.

What I verified directly on ElevenLabs' current pricing and docs pages, since the numbers people quote for this tend to be out of date:

• Cost: Dubbing is available on every plan, including Free. Automatic dubbing runs roughly 2,000 credits per minute of source video with a watermark, or about 3,000 credits per minute without one. Free gives you 10,000 credits a month, Starter ($6/mo) gives 30,000, Creator ($22/mo) gives 121,000.
• Watermark: Free-plan dubs are watermarked with no way to remove it. Any paid plan removes the watermark.
• File limits: Through the website, a file can be up to 2GB and 180 minutes long, across more than a dozen common video and audio formats, with video up to 4K.

For two languages on, say, a 3-minute product video, that's roughly 6,000 to 9,000 credits per language, so 12,000 to 18,000 for both Arabic and Hindi. On Starter's 30,000 monthly credits, that fits comfortably with room for a few more videos.

Scale that up to a real video library and the numbers still work in your favor. Say you're a distributor with 15 product demo videos, averaging 4 minutes each, and you want all of them in both Arabic and Hindi. That's 15 x 4 x 2 = 120 minutes of dubbing, at roughly 3,000 credits a minute unwatermarked, which lands around 360,000 credits. Creator's 121,000 monthly credits won't cover that in one month, but Pro's $99/month allowance comfortably does, and Scale ($299/month) gives you enough headroom to redo the whole library again if your pricing or product lineup changes later in the year. The subscription cost is the real constraint here, not the dubbing mechanics themselves.

Which Arabic does it use, and does dialect matter?

ElevenLabs' own documentation doesn't expose a dialect picker the way some translation tools let you choose "Gulf Arabic" versus "Egyptian Arabic" versus Modern Standard Arabic as separate options; you select "Arabic" and the model produces output in what functions as a standard, broadly understood register. For most product and sales content that's fine, standard Arabic reads as professional and is understood everywhere. Where it can matter is idiom and informal phrasing: a line that sounds natural and warm in Gulf-dialect Arabic can read as slightly stiff or overly formal in the standard output, and vice versa for colloquial phrasing that doesn't travel outside its region. This is exactly the kind of thing a native-speaker review catches and a confidence-only check from a non-native reviewer won't, so if you're specifically targeting Gulf buyers (as several distributors and Dubai-based brokerages using this feature are), make sure whoever reviews the Arabic output is actually from that region, not just an Arabic speaker generally.

What about videos with more than one speaker?

If your video has multiple people talking, a presenter and a customer in a testimonial, two people on a sales call recording, the dubbing API has a num_speakers setting. Leave it at 0 and the system auto-detects how many distinct speakers are in the audio; set it manually if auto-detection gets it wrong, which happens more often with crosstalk, overlapping speech, or a quiet third voice in the background. I couldn't find a published hard cap on how many speakers one job supports, so for a video with more than two or three distinct voices, it's worth running a short test segment first and checking that each speaker's dubbed voice stays consistent and attributed to the right person before committing the whole file.

One more distinction worth knowing, since ElevenLabs shipped a related but different feature in October 2026: Dubbing (what this article covers) works on a finished, pre-recorded video or audio file. ElevenLabs also added Realtime Translation that same month, for converting live speech as it happens, a live sales call or a live webinar session rather than a recording you upload afterward. If what you actually need is translating a conversation while it's happening, not re-dubbing a video you already have, that's the feature to look at instead; this article's steps are specifically for content you've already recorded.

Step by step: how to dub a video into Arabic and Hindi

1. Prep the source video. Clean audio in, cleaner dub out. If there's background noise, music that drowns out speech, or multiple people talking over each other, fix that first.
2. Upload and pick your target languages. Head to ElevenLabs Dubbing and select Arabic and Hindi as separate dubbing jobs or in the same run, depending on the tool's current flow. You'll get one output file per language.
3. Generate the dub. The system transcribes, translates, and regenerates the audio in the target language, keeping the original speaker's vocal character and the background track.
4. Review with a native speaker. Don't skip this. Translation quality on names, product terms, prices and idioms varies, and this is the single step most people are tempted to skip because the output sounds fluent. Fluent and correct aren't the same thing.
5. Fix anything wrong and regenerate. If a term or phrase is off, you're generally better off adjusting the source script or the translation input and regenerating that segment, since direct line-by-line editing of the translated transcript is limited unless you're on an Enterprise plan with API access to the v2 editing tools. The wider fix is in fixing a wrong translation in a dubbed video before publishing.
6. Publish with the dubbed track, not the original, as the default audio for that market.

What I'd tell you if you asked me directly

If you're selling into Arabic and Hindi-speaking markets and your video is only in English right now, dubbing it with ElevenLabs is close to free money. The cost is a few thousand credits, a small fraction of even the cheapest paid plan, against a video that can now actually be watched and understood by people who were previously scrolling past it.

Where I'd slow down: don't treat the AI output as the final translation, treat it as a very strong first draft. Price points, model numbers, warranty terms, anything that could create a real misunderstanding if mistranslated, needs a native speaker's eyes before it goes live. That review takes 10 to 15 minutes for a short video. Skipping it to save that time is the one mistake that actually costs you something, a buyer who thinks the price was different, or a term that reads as rude in the target language.

When should you skip this and hire someone instead?

If the video is genuinely high-stakes, a flagship launch, a legally binding explanation of terms, a safety procedure, pay for a professional translator and a native voice actor instead. The cost difference is real, but so is the risk of an AI mistranslation on something that matters that much. For everyday sales, training and marketing video, the AI route plus a native-speaker review is the right balance of cost, speed and accuracy for almost everyone. For Arabic, the subtitles, dubbing and lip sync options are laid out side by side.

How I'd approach this

When a client has a library of videos that need to go multilingual, not just one, I don't dub them one at a time by hand. I build a small pipeline on top of ElevenLabs' API that takes a video in, runs the dub, and routes the output to whoever needs to do the native-speaker review, so the bottleneck is the human check, not the dubbing itself. If you've got a handful of videos to translate once, the tool on its own is enough. If this is an ongoing need across a growing video library, that's the point where a custom setup starts paying for itself. Get in touch if you want help scoping that.