Pashto subtitling services

Because the typeface covers Arabic and stops short of Pashto. Pashto adds eight consonants and two vowel letters that Arabic and Persian never needed, and a font that lacks them draws a box, or draws the base shape without the marks that tell one letter from another. Tell us where the file is going to play and we will deliver something that carries the whole alphabet, or burn the captions in.

Not on its own. Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Pashto share a block in Unicode, not a character set, so a tick against Arabic says nothing about the ten characters Pashto adds on top. The same goes for an editing suite that opens the file happily. We take the claim as a starting point and then look at the actual letters in the actual face before anything ships.

It depends which side of the border your audience is on. Afghan usage favours ګ at U+06AB and Pakistani usage favours گ at U+06AF, and the same kind of split affects kaf and ye. Both are readable either way, but the wrong choice marks the file as made for somewhere else and trips a spell check aimed at the other market. We settle it at the brief and hold it across every episode.

It can be, and it is worth catching early. An Arabic layout produces the Arabic code points for letters that Pashto spells with its own, so words that look correct on screen do not match in a search, a glossary lookup or a QA pass, and the shaping at the end of a word can come out wrong. Normalising that is editorial work a native subtitler does, and it is part of the job rather than an extra.

From £20 for each minute of running video. The variables are the duration of the piece, whether a transcript has to be produced before spotting can start, whether you want an accessibility version or the captions burnt into the picture, and the size of the format list. Checking the character coverage on your platform sits inside the rate. Every quote is broken down line by line, with the Price Match Promise attached.

Yes, and it is a large part of what we do in this language. Same-language captions and SDH carry the dialogue along with speaker labels and the sounds a viewer cannot hear, which is what accessibility reviewers check. The alphabet question does not soften when the source is Pashto — if anything an SDH file has more Pashto-only letters in it, not fewer, so the same coverage sweep runs.

Generally yes, and it saves a step. Our subtitlers spot it to picture and rebuild the lines, opening with a look at whether the Pashto-only letters are still there or have quietly turned into their Arabic neighbours somewhere in the file's history. That substitution is common and invisible to anyone who does not read the language. Where no file exists, we transcribe the audio in house.

They do, and into Avid and the platforms' own caption editors as well, in SRT, VTT, STL or TTML. Keep in mind that an editing timeline draws the text in a font of its own choosing, so a letter approving there is no guarantee. Where the playback environment is out of your hands, a burnt-in master takes the typeface decision off the table completely.