Danish subtitling services

The Danish guidelines by default, since that is the reference the industry there produced for itself: one or two lines, a ceiling of 38 to 40 characters each, and a reading speed of 10 to 15 a second. Where your delivery spec sets other numbers we build to those instead, and either way the file comes back with the set it follows stated on it.

The two figures come from different places. Forty-two is the pan-European working default that platform guides adopted, and Netflix does allow it for Danish with a faster read. The national guidelines put the ceiling at 38 to 40, tied to what sits comfortably in frame alongside the exposure times Denmark works to. Both are defensible. Delivering against the wrong one is what looks careless.

Longer than you may expect. The guidelines give a full single line 3 to 4 seconds and two full lines 5 to 6, with 2 seconds the floor for short events and roughly 8 the maximum, plus a three or four frame gap between consecutive subtitles. Holding text that long is why the character count and the reading speed both sit lower than the streaming default.

Routinely, and the guidelines assume it. They call it sladreeffekten: the viewer hears the original, understands a good part of it, and compares it with the line on screen. With English audio most Danes do this without trying. It means the condensing the timings demand has to preserve what was actually said, which is a harder brief than simply making the line fit.

Danish subtitling starts at £20 per minute of running time, the band we apply to the Scandinavian languages. Because the Danish reading speed runs below the pan-European default, more of the work goes into condensing to fit the exposure time, and that is inside the rate. Programme length, transcription, SDH, a burnt-in master and the number of formats move the figure. Price Match Promise applies.

Yes, and Danish treats it as a discipline in its own right: TH-tekster, same-language subtitles made for viewers with hearing loss, have their own published set of guidance alongside the main document. We produce those, and plain same-language Danish captions for social video and search, where the job is getting the words on screen inside the same exposure times.

It usually is, and it usually brings the price down. The existing cues get measured against the speech and the picture first, because a file timed to another market's rhythm rarely holds the Danish exposure times or the frame gap between events. Anything too short for the text in it is re-cued or shortened. Where no file exists, we transcribe the Danish audio instead.

All the common ones. Our SRT and VTT files import into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the major online editors with æ, ø and å intact, while EBU-STL and TTML cover broadcast and streaming delivery including the gap between events. Where you would rather not handle a separate file, we supply the video with the text burnt in.