Afrikaans subtitling services

Because a title-case function does what it was built to do. Afrikaans keeps the indefinite article in lower case even at the start of a sentence and moves the capital to the next word, which no English-language styling rule knows about. Anything that capitalises the first letter of a cue produces 'N Hond, and the error repeats on every line that opens with an article. We set those capitals at source instead.

One of them, consistently. Unicode's recommendation is the modifier letter apostrophe, U+02BC, because the mark is part of the word rather than punctuation; the straight U+0027 is what keyboards give you and what most subtitle specs are happy with. What causes trouble is mixing them, or letting a smart-quotes setting swap in the curly U+2019 halfway down the file. Tell us your delivery spec and we will hold to one.

Yes, and it is a common request. We normalise the article to a single apostrophe character throughout, restore the capitalisation to the word it belongs on, and flag anywhere the deprecated precomposed character has crept in, since some fonts no longer carry it. This is a pass over the whole file rather than a find and replace, because the same two characters appear in contractions where the rules differ.

Both. It is one written standard, set out in the Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls, so a single file serves readers on either side of the border. What changes is register and the terminology a given sector uses, and your subtitler is briefed on the audience before starting. Where content is aimed at a specific region we will raise it rather than assume.

Afrikaans subtitling is priced per minute of video, from £18. Normalising the article and its apostrophe across the whole file is part of that rate rather than a line on the invoice. Beyond it, the figure follows running time, whether transcription is needed first, whether you want SDH or burned-in output, and how many formats you need. Every job is quoted individually and backed by our Price Match Promise.

Yes, and it is half of what we do in this language. Same-language Afrikaans captions and SDH are the files accessibility teams ask for and the ones that carry a muted social feed. The article and its apostrophe matter more here, not less, because there is no translation stage where a human would have caught them.

Certainly. We spot and time from what you send, and the first pass checks how the article survived whatever last saved the file — that is where inherited Afrikaans files pick up mixed apostrophes and stray capitals. If you have no transcript we produce one from the audio first. Either route gets the same linguistic and technical QA.

They will. SRT, VTT, STL and TTML go into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors with the apostrophes and capitals as we set them — worth checking after import, since some editors re-run their own autocorrect. Burnt-in MP4 or MOV removes that risk altogether.