Haitian Creole subtitling services

Because it is not French spelling at all. Creole is written phonemically: one letter per sound, no silent letters, and no c, q or x. Words that came from French lost everything that was not pronounced, so du riz became diri and la lune became lalin. It reads as odd only if you are measuring it against French, which is exactly the mistake most software in the chain makes.

First find out what language it thinks it is reading. A checker, an autocorrect or a translation engine set to French will rewrite Creole line by line and report the result as an improvement. Tell us where the file will be reviewed and by what, and we can either set the language on our side of the handover or deliver open captions, which nothing downstream can edit.

It does. è and ò are letters of the alphabet, not accented versions of e and o, and dropping the mark can land you on a different word. It usually happens in a normalisation step somewhere in the pipeline rather than in the translation. We check the accents on the file we deliver, and again after any encode that the subtitles have to survive.

The official one: the orthography issued in 1979 and maintained since by the Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen. It is what Haitian schools, ministries and publishers use, and it reads the same in Port-au-Prince as it does in Brooklyn or Montreal. If your organisation has house terminology on top of it, we work to that as well and keep it consistent across a series.

From £20 per minute of video. The figure moves with running time, with whether we transcribe the Creole audio before anything else, with SDH or a burnt-in master, and with the number of output formats going out at the end. The character-level check on the orthography is part of QA, not a line on the invoice. Every project is quoted individually with our Price Match Promise.

Yes, and a good share of our Haitian Creole work is exactly that. Same-language captions and SDH for Creole audio serve accessibility duties and muted social video, and with no translation step the skill goes into spotting, condensing and getting spoken Creole onto the page in its written form. Public information video is where we see this most often.

Send it across. We spot and time from what you give us, and the first thing we look at is which spelling system it was typed in, because older or informal documents often predate the current standard or come from a keyboard that could not produce è and ò. Without a transcript we start from the audio. Either way the same linguistic and technical QA runs at the end.

They will. SRT, VTT, STL and TTML files carry the Creole characters into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the main browser-based editors. The step worth doing on your side is a quick look at the text after import, since that is where a stray encoding setting shows itself. If you would rather not have the question at all, we burn the subtitles into an MP4 or MOV.