Lingala subtitling services

It depends on who is watching, and it is a decision for the brief rather than for QA. Institutional, religious and educational Lingala keeps the open vowels; a lot of Kinshasa-facing media does not, and its readers are used to seeing e and o. We will recommend one based on your audience and your existing material, then apply it consistently. What we avoid is a file that does both.

Because of where they live in Unicode. The two characters sit in the IPA Extensions block, which many typefaces skip on the assumption it is phonetic notation rather than an alphabet in use. When the font in your player has no glyph for them, the system fetches one from somewhere else, and you get two letters mid-word in another design. Tell us the destination and we will check it there, or burn the subtitles in.

Yes, and it is a reading job rather than a conversion. Nothing in the file records which e was once an ɛ, so the letter has to be decided word by word from the meaning and, where we have it, from the audio. A native Lingala subtitler does that pass. If you would rather keep the file as it stands, that is a legitimate choice too, and we will say so at the brief.

Usually yes, and we will tell you when it is not sensible. The written language is shared across the river and a single subtitle file normally serves both cities and the wider region. Where a script leans heavily on Kinshasa vocabulary, or where an institutional client needs the literary written form, we adapt rather than ship the same text twice. Your project manager raises it before work starts.

Lingala subtitling is priced by the minute of finished video, from £20, and the Lingala-specific work sits inside that rate rather than on top of it. The figure moves with 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 is quoted on its own, with the Price Match Promise behind it.

Both. Translating an English or French video into Lingala subtitles is one job; same-language Lingala captions and SDH for footage already in Lingala is another, and we deliver either. The second is common in public health and development work, where the audience is listening in Lingala already and the captions exist for accessibility, for noisy rooms, or for social video playing muted.

Yes, send it over. We spot and time against your transcript or SRT, and the first pass establishes which orthography it was written in, so that everything added afterwards matches rather than drifting. If there is no transcript we work from the Lingala audio instead. Either route, the file gets the same linguistic and technical QA before it comes back to you.

They do. Lingala SRT, VTT, STL and TTML import into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors with the open vowels intact. The catch is display rather than import: an editor whose interface font lacks those two glyphs will show them oddly even though the file is fine. We check the finished output, not the editing window.