Brazilian Portuguese subtitling services

Because they are built to ABNT NBR 15290, the Brazilian standard for accessibility in television communication, which caps a caption line at 32 characters. The streaming style guide for the same language allows 42, so the two produce visibly different files from one script. Neither is wrong. What matters is knowing which one your delivery is measured against before the text is written, because the tighter count decides how much has to go.

The standard sets the floor and we work to it: at least 98% correct on live output, with a delay of up to four seconds tolerated against the audio. A third line is permitted live, where a prepared file uses two. Material captioned from a finished video is held to complete accuracy instead, which is the normal case for everything we build from a delivered master.

The platform spec, and for Brazilian Portuguese that is 42 characters a line at up to 17 a second, 13 on children's programmes. The accessibility standard governs broadcast television, where a 2006 ministerial rule made captions compulsory and pointed at it by name. We ask where the file is going at the brief so it gets built to one specification rather than reworked into a second afterwards.

Inside Brazil it travels between broadcast and online once the line count is settled. For Portugal it does not: that is a separate European Portuguese version written by a subtitler there, because the spelling, the pronoun placement and a fair amount of everyday vocabulary all part company. Where both are wanted we time them from one English template, so the cues line up and only the text differs.

It is priced by the minute of running time, from £15. The figure moves with length, whether a transcript has to be made first, whether you want SDH or a burnt-in master, and how many formats you need. Building to the 32-character count takes more condensing than building to 42, so it is worth saying at the brief. Every job is quoted individually with our Price Match Promise.

Both, and same-language work is routine here. Portuguese audio gets SDH and closed captions in Portuguese, which is the version accessibility teams request and the one that carries a muted feed on Instagram or TikTok. The character rules land on a same-language caption exactly as they do on a translated one, so we agree the count when we agree the format, and speaker labels follow it.

Yes, and it saves time. We import what you send, re-spot anything running past the reading speed, and re-break the lines against the count your delivery needs, which is the step most inherited files have skipped. An automatic transcript gets a full accuracy read first. With nothing to start from we transcribe the Brazilian audio ourselves, and either route goes through the same QA.

All the usual ones. SRT and VTT, or STL and TTML, drop into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors with the line breaks we set still in place, which is where a careless re-import does its damage. Broadcast specs are matched to whatever you send us. If a sidecar file is awkward at your end, we hand back an MP4, MOV or ProRes with the captions burnt in.