Simplified Chinese subtitling services

Because the two counts describe the same width. Unicode treats Han ideographs as wide characters, each filling a full em against the half em a Latin letter takes, so sixteen of them stretch about as far across the frame as forty-two English letters do. The limit is a measurement of the picture rather than a restriction on the language, which is why counting code points misleads you.

It is the convention platform style sets out. Where a comma belongs, the subtitle takes a single space, and the event closes without a full stop. Enumeration commas are kept inside lists, written A、B、C, but not at the end of a line or subtitle. To a Chinese audience it reads as ordinary. To anyone checking it against an English script it can look like missing punctuation.

Only some of them. Numerals stay half-width, so a date, a price or a product code is typed the way it would be in English. The ellipsis is one character, U+2026, rather than three separate stops. Get the widths mixed inside a line and nothing breaks technically, but the spacing looks uneven to a reader and it is one of the first things QC flags.

More than most briefs expect. Nine a second on adult programming, seven on children's, and eighteen characters with eleven a second once you move to SDH. The line and the rate come down together, so a dialogue-heavy scene needs rewriting rather than trimming. That is a translation skill, and it is why a native subtitler drafts these rather than an automated pass.

Simplified Chinese subtitling is priced by the minute of running time, from £20. Condensing into the sixteen-character line and applying the punctuation conventions sits inside that rate rather than beside it. The figure moves with programme length, whether a transcript is needed first, an SDH pass, a burnt-in master and the number of delivery formats. Every job is quoted individually under our Price Match Promise.

That is a good share of the work here. Same-language Chinese captions and SDH are what an accessibility brief asks for and what keeps a video working with the sound off. The sixteen-character line, the reading speed and the punctuation conventions apply exactly as they do to a translated file, and a transcript comes first either way.

Usually, yes. We spot and time against your picture from what you send, re-break any line running past sixteen positions and clear out the commas and full stops a translated document brings with it. Should the file turn out to be in traditional characters, we flag it rather than convert it blindly: our Traditional Chinese subtitling page covers that readership.

All the common ones. Our SRT, VTT, STL and TTML files carry the Chinese text and the full-width marks intact into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the major online editors, and we confirm each renders before delivery. Where a team would rather not handle a sidecar file at all, we hand back a finished MP4 or MOV with the text already in the picture.