Canadian French subtitling services

The accent is exactly the part that does not survive into a subtitle, which is why people assume one file will do. What does survive is the vocabulary, and that is where the two diverge most: Québec keeps its own term in a string of everyday cases where France has taken the English word. Reading one while hearing the other is what tells a Montréal audience the file was not made for them.

You can, and it will be understood. It will also carry a space before every question mark, which the Canadian guide does not use, alongside whatever vocabulary choices were made for a Paris audience. If the content matters commercially, we re-punctuate and run a terminology pass over the existing file, which is far cheaper than subtitling the video again.

That depends entirely on where it airs. The captioning obligation sits with broadcasters, who are required to caption 100% of the broadcast day and 100% of their advertising and promotional content. A company publishing video on its own site is not covered by that, though accessibility law and platform policy may still apply. If your content is going to a Canadian broadcaster, the requirement will reach you through their delivery spec.

For pre-recorded programming the target is 100%, spelling included, which is the standard we work to by default. Live captioning is judged on a different scale — the published target for French-language live is 85%, against 98% for English — because it is produced in real time by a different process. Anything we subtitle from a finished video is held to the recorded standard.

From £20 per minute of video. Canadian French sits in a higher rate band than European French, which starts at £15, because the pool of qualified Québécois subtitlers is smaller. The figure also moves with running time, with whether the audio needs transcribing first, with SDH or burnt-in delivery and with how many formats leave with the job.

Yes, and it is the sensible way to buy both. The spotting is identical, so we time once and produce two text passes on top of it — each punctuated to its own guide and each checked against its own terminology. You get two files without paying for the timing twice.

Yes, and for Canadian broadcast work that is most of what we do. Same-language captions and SDH are a separate discipline from translating into French: the captioner is working from what was actually said, identifying speakers and marking the sound that carries meaning, which is what the accessibility standard is built around.

All the usual ones, plus the broadcast set. SRT and VTT for players and platforms, STL, TTML and CAP where a Canadian broadcaster asks for them, all importing cleanly into Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the main online editors. We can also burn the subtitles into a finished MP4 or MOV where no separate file is wanted.