Arabic subtitling services

Modern Standard Arabic is understood across the entire Arabic speaking world and is the usual choice for corporate, educational, and pan regional content. A regional dialect connects more directly with one country and suits advertising and entertainment aimed at a single market. We advise on the right fit before the work begins.

Subtitles carry the spoken dialogue for viewers watching in another language. Captions are designed for deaf and hard of hearing audiences and also include sound effects, music cues, and speaker identification. SDH combines both. Which you need depends on your audience, your platform, and in some cases on accessibility requirements attached to distribution.

Carefully, because this is where bidirectional text most often breaks. Numbers, brand names, and technical terms left in Latin script sit inside a right to left line and can display in the wrong order depending on the player. We test files rather than assuming, and flag anything that will not survive a particular platform.

Automatic tools handle Arabic poorly. Diacritics are usually absent from written Arabic, dialect variation confuses recognition, and right to left rendering compounds the problem. Beyond accuracy, the timing and line breaking decisions that make subtitles readable are editorial judgements. Every file we deliver is produced and checked by a native Arabic subtitler.

Whichever your platform or workflow requires. SRT works across most video platforms and editing tools, VTT is standard for web and streaming, STL and EBU-STL are used for broadcast, and TTML is common in streaming and enterprise contexts. We can also deliver burned-in subtitles.

Arabic subtitling is charged by the running minute of video. Right-to-left layout, the choice between Modern Standard Arabic and a regional dialect, and mixed Arabic/Latin on-screen text can each affect the work, alongside running time, transcription, SDH or burned-in output and formats. Each project gets its own quote, with the Price Match Promise behind it.

Yes. As well as translating into Arabic, we produce same-language Arabic captions and SDH — the closed captioning many broadcasters and brands need for accessibility and muted social. If your video is already in Arabic and you just want accurate RTL on-screen captions, that is core to our Arabic captioning service.

Yes — where a transcript or SRT exists, we work straight from it, making sure right-to-left punctuation and any embedded Latin words or numerals sit correctly. Otherwise we transcribe the Arabic audio first. Every file goes through the same linguistic and technical QA.

All of them, in practice. SRT, VTT, STL and TTML files that carry Arabic right-to-left text cleanly into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the major online players — or burnt into the picture as a finished MP4/MOV if you would rather not handle bidirectional text yourself.

Less than people expect: the video, or a link to it, its running time, which platform or broadcaster it is going to, and the date you need it by. A rough cut is fine — we would rather quote on what exists than wait for picture lock and lose a week of your schedule. A named project manager comes back with an itemised quote, normally within four working hours.

More than half of enquiries get a reply within thirty minutes during office hours (Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm UK time), and the itemised quote normally follows within four working hours. After that you have one dedicated project manager who owns the job from brief to final file — not a ticket queue, and not a different name on every email. If it is easier, call +44 207 095 5730 and ask for them by name.

Yes, and it is one of the commonest reasons people get in touch. Tell us it is for a pitch and you get a figure you can put in front of your own client, itemised so it stands up to being picked apart, with no obligation and no follow-up sales calls if the pitch goes elsewhere. If it lands, the quote still holds and we already know the project.