Japanese subtitling services

Because reading speed is measured in what a viewer can absorb, not in characters saved. Kanji carry more meaning per character and take longer to process than Latin letters, so the comfortable characters per second rate is lower. A line that looks short can still be too fast to read, which is why Japanese subtitling standards differ from European ones rather than simply scaling down.

By following Japanese typographic conventions rather than looking for a gap. There are established rules about which characters cannot begin or end a line and where a break is acceptable within a phrase, and a subtitler applies them the way an English subtitler avoids splitting a noun from its article. Software that breaks purely on character count gets this wrong constantly.

Whatever the relationship on screen implies. Colleagues, strangers, and friends do not address one another the same way in Japanese, and flattening that across a file removes information the dialogue is conveying. For corporate and instructional content, a consistent polite register is usually right; for drama or dialogue-driven material, it should follow the speakers.

Yes. Alongside standard subtitles, we produce files that include sound effects, music cues, and speaker identification for deaf and hard of hearing viewers, formatted to the specification your platform or broadcaster requires.

For a short video, 24 to 48 hours is typical. What moves that is whether a Japanese transcript already exists, the length of the finished cut, and how many output formats you need. The timeline is agreed with your project manager before work begins.

Japanese subtitling is charged by the running minute of video, from £20. Setting the politeness level and breaking lines to Japanese typographic rules are part of the work; the figure also follows running time, transcription, SDH or burnt-in delivery, and the count of output formats. Every project is priced individually, backed by the Price Match Promise.

Of course. An existing transcript or SRT becomes our spotting file, re-breaking any line where a tool has split the text at a point Japanese typography does not allow. Otherwise we transcribe the Japanese audio first. The same two-stage QA, linguistic and technical, covers every file.

All the usual ones. You get SRT, VTT, STL and TTML that keep the Japanese character set and the line breaks intact into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the major online editors — or burnt into the picture as a finished MP4/MOV.

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.