Icelandic subtitling services

A person decides, at translation time. The options are to keep the compound whole and build the cue around it, to divide it at the point where its elements join, or to say the same thing with a shorter Icelandic construction. Which one is right depends on the term and on what the cue has to carry, so it is a judgement rather than a setting, and it is made before the file is timed.

At the join between the elements, never inside one. The catch is that the join is not always obvious: the same string of letters can be read as two different pairs of words, and choosing between them means knowing which pair the sentence meant. Iceland keeps a dedicated word-division dataset for exactly this reason, and it is still a lexical call rather than a mechanical one.

Almost certainly, and that is unusual enough to be worth saying. Both have been part of the standard Western European character set for decades, so ordinary player fonts carry them. The place to check is on-screen text set in full capitals, where the capital Ð appears — it shows up nowhere else, because no Icelandic word starts with the letter, so it is the one people retype wrongly.

Because Iceland tends to coin a native compound where English takes in an international word. A term that arrives in the source as one short borrowing can leave as a purpose-built Icelandic construction, and that construction is written closed as a single word. It is a deliberate language policy rather than a translator being verbose, and it is the main pressure on an Icelandic subtitle line.

From £20 for each minute of running video. Duration accounts for most of the variation, then transcription if the audio has not been typed up, an accessibility version or a burnt-in master where the order includes one, and how many formats you want delivered. Fitting Icelandic vocabulary inside the published limits is the job itself, not an extra on top of it. Quotes are itemised, and the Price Match Promise applies.

Yes, and there is a technical wrinkle worth knowing. SDH runs at a higher reading speed than a standard subtitle under the published Icelandic spec, so a same-language file can legitimately carry more text per second than a translated one. We write to that figure rather than to the subtitle figure, which gives the long words a little more room than they get in a translation.

Yes, and please send it. A transcript is written to be read at the reader's own pace and a subtitle is not, so the lines get rebuilt rather than simply timed, and in Icelandic that rebuilding is mostly a question of where the long terms are allowed to land. If you have no transcript, we type the audio up in house and start there.

They do, in SRT, VTT, STL or TTML, into Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut, Avid and the platforms' caption editors. One setting is worth finding and turning off: automatic re-wrapping. A tool that reflows the text puts breaks back wherever the count runs out and quietly undoes the ones a subtitler chose, which in Icelandic is the part of the work you paid for.