Burmese subtitling services

Because the signal it looks for is not there. Burmese leaves no space between words, and the spaces that do appear separate phrases rather than words, so wrapping on whitespace gives you a full phrase or a broken word. A valid break sits on a syllable boundary, and even then not in front of a stacked character. That is a judgement a Burmese subtitler makes line by line.

The two devices are almost certainly reading different encodings. Zawgyi and Unicode occupy the same block of code points and disagree about what some of them mean, so one file draws correctly under one system and as noise under the other, with nothing in the bytes to say which it is. We identify what you send, convert it where that is needed, and look at the result on screen before it goes out.

Unicode, unless a broadcaster or an existing library forces your hand. Myanmar moved across officially on 1 October 2019 and current handsets start there, while search, sorting and accessibility tooling all assume it. Where a legacy system still has to be fed, we build the Unicode master first and supply a converted copy beside it so both destinations get something that renders.

It can undo the work, which is why we ask where the file is going. Some players honour the breaks in the file and some re-flow the text to fit their own box, and a re-flow in Burmese lands wherever the algorithm decides rather than on a syllable edge. Where the environment is unknown or unreliable, burning the subtitles into the picture settles the breaks permanently.

Burmese subtitling is priced by the minute of running time, from £20. Setting the break points and confirming the encoding are inside that rate, not added to it. What changes the figure is programme length, whether a transcript is needed first, an SDH pass, a burnt-in master, and the number of formats leaving with you. Every job is quoted on its own and the Price Match Promise applies.

Yes, and it is a steady part of the work. Same-language Burmese captions and SDH are what accessibility briefs and muted social campaigns call for, and they meet the same two problems a translated file does: where the line may break, and which encoding the destination reads. We transcribe in Unicode, time it against your picture, and confirm the shaping on screen.

Send it across. The first thing we establish is which encoding it carries, because a Zawgyi transcript poured into a Unicode timeline looks fine in one window and wrong in the next. After that we spot and time from it, rebuild any break that fell inside a syllable, and run it through the same linguistic and technical QA as anything we originate.

All the common ones. Our SRT, VTT, STL and TTML files carry the Burmese text and its break points into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the major online editors, and we confirm each one renders before delivery. Where a workflow cannot be trusted with the script, a finished MP4 or MOV with the text in the picture removes the question entirely.