Ask 101: Kurdish Subtitle
Zara felt her chest tighten. 101 hours. One person, anonymous, had decided that the sound of her father’s lullabies, the curses her grandmother whispered over tea, the names of the mountains— Cûdî, Agirî, Gabar —deserved to be seen, not just heard.
Zara looked at her own screen. She was trying to learn coding, but her heart wasn’t in it. Instead, she opened a new tab and typed:
That night, she didn’t close her laptop. She found a free subtitle editor online. She opened a blank document and wrote her first line:
A year later, a student in Sulaymaniyah added Sorani subtitles. A mother in Sweden corrected her grammar. A grandpa in Duhok, who had never touched a computer, dictated the names of ancient villages his grandson typed into the timeline. ask 101 kurdish subtitle
Her father stopped breathing. He leaned forward. “Who did this?”
Heval sighed, turning up the volume as if volume could translate longing. “They don’t care,” he muttered. “To them, we are just noise.”
Navê min Zara ye. Ev çîroka min e. (My name is Zara. This is my story.) Zara felt her chest tighten
Inside was a lone file: a subtitle track for a famous, beautiful Iranian film about a poet who loses his memory. The film had English, German, French subs—but someone, somewhere, had spent weeks translating it into Kurmanji. The timecodes were perfect. The diacritics were correct. At the bottom of the file, a note in broken English: “Ask not what your language can do for you. Ask what you can do for your language. 101 hours of work. Free.”
It was an odd, broken search phrase. She had meant to search for “How to add Kurdish subtitles to any video (Ask 101).” But the internet, in its chaotic poetry, corrected nothing.
They never met. They never spoke. But every time the cursor blinked, it asked the same question: Are you listening? Zara looked at her own screen
And the answer, in 101 Kurdish subtitles, was always: Em guhdar dikin. (We are listening.)
The results were barren. A few old forums, a dead link to a SubRip tutorial in Turkish, a YouTube comment from 2015: “Kurmanji subtitle pls?” with no reply.
It didn’t fit perfectly—the documentary was about politics, the subtitles were for a film about a poet. But for five glorious minutes, the timing matched. A Kurdish elder on screen said, “Em ê vegere,” and the subtitle read: “We will return.”
The cursor blinked on Zara’s laptop screen like a metronome counting down to midnight. She was seventeen, a Kurdish girl from a small town in Bakur (northern Kurdistan), living now in a cramped Berlin apartment. Her father, Heval, was watching a grainy documentary about the mountains of their homeland. The men on screen spoke Kurmanji, but the only subtitle read: [speaking foreign language].