Igbo subtitling services

Because standard written Igbo does not use them. The Ọnwụ orthography marks the dotted vowels ị, ọ and ụ but leaves tone off the page entirely, and tone-marked Igbo belongs to dictionaries and teaching material rather than to published text or broadcast captions. Adding the marks would make your file read as a language course to the audience watching it. We settle the ambiguity in the wording instead.

By writing each cue so it only reads one way. A spelling such as akwa covers several unrelated words, and prose lets a reader work backwards from what surrounds it, which a subtitle does not. Our subtitlers work from the Igbo audio, where the tone is plainly audible, and where the obvious phrasing would be ambiguous on its own they pick a wording that is not. That is most of the craft in an Igbo file.

Yes, and it comes up constantly, because very few keyboards offer an Igbo layout and the dots get dropped at typing. Restoring them is not something you can automate: whether a vowel takes a dot depends on which word it belongs to, and a wrong guess produces something an Igbo reader stops on. A native subtitler reads the file against the audio and corrects it as part of the job.

Usually, and we confirm it rather than assume it. All three have single Unicode code points, U+1ECB, U+1ECD and U+1EE5, in a block plenty of display fonts leave out. So there are two failures worth watching for: an empty box where the letter should be, and the quieter one, where something in the chain strips the dot and leaves a plain vowel that still looks like a word. Tell us where the file is going and we will check it there.

Igbo subtitling is priced by the minute of finished video, from £20, and the Igbo-specific part of the work is inside that rate rather than billed on top. What moves the figure is running time, whether we transcribe before translating, whether you want SDH or a burned-in version, and how many output formats leave with the job. Every project gets its own quote, with the Price Match Promise behind it.

Both, and they are two different jobs. Translating an English video into Igbo subtitles is one; same-language Igbo captions and SDH for footage that is already in Igbo is another. Captioning Igbo audio is where the tonal question is easiest to settle, because the subtitler is listening to the speaker rather than reading someone else's script, and can hear which word was said before deciding how to write it.

Yes, send it over. We spot and time against your transcript or SRT, and the first pass looks at two things: whether the dotted vowels survived whatever saved the file last, and whether any cue can be read as a word other than the one intended. If there is no transcript we start from the Igbo audio. Either route, the file gets the same linguistic and technical QA before it comes back to you.

They do. Igbo SRT, VTT, STL and TTML import into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors with ị, ọ and ụ intact. The thing to watch is a tool or a CMS that normalises text on the way in and flattens them without saying so, which is why we re-check after any conversion in your chain. If you would rather take the font out of the question altogether, we deliver a burned-in MP4 or MOV.