English subtitling services

Subtitles carry the spoken dialogue and assume the viewer can hear everything else. Closed captions are made for viewers who cannot hear the audio and include sound effects, music cues, and speaker identification. SDH is subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, and it combines the two: dialogue plus the non speech information, formatted like subtitles rather than broadcast captions. Which you need depends on your audience and your distribution route.

It depends where you are publishing and who you are. Broadcast regulators, public sector accessibility rules, and the major streaming platforms each set their own captioning requirements, and the WCAG accessibility standards are widely referenced for web content. We can advise on what applies to your distribution, though the compliance decision remains yours.

Because it is the source every other version is built from. Translators work from the English template, so its timings, segmentation, and phrasing carry into French, Japanese, Arabic, and everything else in scope. An ambiguity left in the English becomes a translation error repeated across every language you deliver.

They produce a rough transcript quickly and are useful as a starting point. What they do not produce is a broadcast-quality file: speaker changes go unmarked, sound effects are missing, proper nouns and technical terms come out wrong, and lines break where the software runs out of characters rather than where the meaning allows. Every file we deliver is produced and checked by a professional subtitler.

Twenty-four to 48 hours covers most short videos. What changes it is how many output formats you need, whether we transcribe the English audio before we translate, and how long the video runs. Your project manager pins the delivery date down at the brief.

English subtitling is charged by the running minute of video, with the drivers being running time, whether we transcribe or spot from scratch, whether you are taking SDH or burnt-in delivery, and how many formats you want. Because English is compact it condenses less than most languages, which often keeps spotting straightforward. Each project gets its own quote, with the Price Match Promise behind it.

Yes. A lot of English subtitling is same-language captioning — closed captions and SDH for accessibility, social video and search rather than translation. If your video is already in English and you just want accurate on-screen captions or SDH with speaker IDs and sound cues, that is a core part of our English captioning service.

Absolutely. If you already have a transcript, script or a draft SRT/VTT we spot, time and quality-check from it rather than starting from scratch, which usually lowers the cost. If you don't, we transcribe the English audio first. Either way every file goes through the same linguistic and technical QA.

Every common one. We deliver English SRT, VTT, STL and TTML files that drop straight into Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Camtasia and most online editors and players. If you would rather not manage a separate file, we burn the subtitles into an MP4 or MOV instead.

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.