Scottish Gaelic subtitling services

By today's conventions, yes, and it is extremely common in older material. Gaelic once used an acute accent as well as a grave; the orthographic conventions of the 1980s kept only the grave, and school exams and publishers followed. Converting an old script is straightforward in that direction, but it is a job for someone who reads the language, because a few words need a second look rather than a swap.

Please do not, and tell us if something in your chain is doing it. The mark is what separates one word from another: bàta is a boat, bata is a stick. Removing it produces text that is still shaped like Gaelic and no longer says what it said. If a system genuinely cannot carry the characters, the answer is burnt-in subtitles, where the accents are rendered into the picture before that system ever sees them.

Yes, and we ask about its origin before touching the accents. Canadian Gaelic writing often keeps the acute, so a file from Cape Breton may be following its own convention rather than an outdated one. We agree at the brief which convention the deliverable should follow, and then apply it consistently instead of converting on sight.

As themselves, generally. The Gaelic alphabet has eighteen letters and does not include j, k, q, v, w, x, y or z, so a product name or an English term in the dialogue sits outside it and stays in its own spelling. What we agree in advance is the treatment: which names are left alone, which are given a Gaelic form, and how that choice is applied across a series.

From £20 per minute of video. The number moves with running time, with whether the Gaelic audio is transcribed first, with SDH or a burnt-in master, and with how many output formats you need. Checking the accents on the exported file is part of our QA rather than an extra line. Every project is quoted individually and carries the Price Match Promise.

Yes, and much of our Gaelic work is precisely that. Same-language captions and SDH serve accessibility duties and muted social video, and with no translation stage the craft goes into spotting, condensing and putting spoken Gaelic on the page correctly. That last part is where the accents live, and a transcript cannot always settle them on its own.

Usually, and it is often the cheapest route. We check them against the audio and against the current conventions, which is where inherited files tend to show their age, either through the retired acute or through accents lost in an old export. You get the corrections listed rather than silently applied. Where there is nothing to reuse, we work from the audio instead.

They will. SRT, VTT, STL and TTML carry the accented vowels into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors. Worth doing on your side is one look at the text after import and after your own export, since that second step is where a mark occasionally goes missing. Burnt-in subtitles take the question off the table.

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.

Send it over. Our Price Match Promise covers like-for-like work, and because our quotes are itemised you can see exactly what is being compared — which is usually where the gap turns out to be, in a revision pass, a licence or a delivery format that the cheaper figure quietly left out. If it really is the same work for less, we match it.