Jamaican Patois subtitling services

Whichever we agree at the brief, and then the same one for everything that follows. Some clients want the Cassidy/JLU system because it is consistent and teachable; more want the English-based spelling their audience already reads online. We will tell you what each will look like on your footage and what it does to your line counts, and the choice goes on the project sheet before spotting begins.

Yes, and it is the first thing we ask for. Send whatever exists: an old subtitle file, a script, even social posts written by the same team. We build the term list from it rather than imposing one. Where the old material contradicts itself, which it usually does somewhere, we bring you the list of clashes and you decide once, instead of a subtitler deciding differently each time.

It depends on who is watching and why, and we are happy to talk it through on your actual footage. English subtitles over Jamaican audio reach a wider audience and are what most international platforms expect. Jamaican subtitles keep the voice of the piece intact and read as the speech sounds. Plenty of projects ship both, from the same spotting pass, and that is often the cheapest route to either.

By rule, set at the brief and applied everywhere. Jamaican speech runs along a continuum, so a line can sit anywhere from broad Patois to something a London viewer would call English, and a subtitler working without a rule will respell those stretches inconsistently. We fix the treatment of English-derived words, brand names and song titles in advance, and QA checks the file against it.

It starts at £20 per minute of video. Running time moves it, so does transcribing the audio first, so do SDH and a burnt-in master, and so does the number of formats leaving at the end. Agreeing the writing system and building the term list is part of how we set a project up, not an extra service. Every quote is itemised and covered by our Price Match Promise.

Yes, and a lot of our work here is exactly that: same-language Jamaican captions and SDH for accessibility duties and for muted social feeds. Without a translation step the craft sits in spotting, in condensing, and in deciding how speech that shifts register mid-sentence is written down. That last decision is the one the agreed system answers for us.

Send it over. We time against what you give us, and the first pass is a spelling audit rather than a translation check, because transcripts of Jamaican are typed by ear and rarely hold to one convention from top to bottom. We reconcile it to the agreed system and flag anything ambiguous. Without a transcript we start from the audio, and the same QA closes both routes.

They do. SRT, VTT, STL and TTML open in Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors, and the text arrives exactly as delivered. The thing to watch on your side is any spell-check or auto-correct running over the file afterwards, since tools set to English treat Jamaican as a stream of mistakes. Burnt-in subtitles remove that risk entirely.