Samoan subtitling services

Formal t-style unless there is a reason to go the other way, because that is what written Samoan looks like and what a reader expects. The reason to go the other way is usually voice: drama, comedy, vox pops and social content where writing a character in letters nobody would say makes the subtitle sound like a different person. We put the choice in the brief and it holds across the title.

Not by itself. Written Samoan uses the formal consonants by convention, so a subtitle that shows t and n while the speaker says k and the ng sound is following the normal rule. It becomes a mistake when nobody chose it, or when the same programme does it one way in the narration and another way in the interviews without a reason. Tell us which effect you want and we will keep it consistent.

Yes, and it is often the right call. A presenter reading a script and a resident answering a question in their own kitchen are not speaking the same way, and flattening both into one style loses something a Samoan viewer hears immediately. We map it speaker by speaker at the brief, write the map into the project notes, and check it on the read-through rather than trusting memory across a long file.

No, which is exactly why it needs deciding rather than discovering. Swapping t for k and n for g leaves the character count untouched, so reading speed, line breaks and cue durations are unaffected and no automated check will ever query it. The only thing that changes is who the text sounds like. That makes it an editorial decision with a Samoan speaker attached, not a technical setting.

From £20 for every minute of running video. The length of the programme moves the figure most, then whether we transcribe the Samoan audio before anything else happens, whether you want an accessibility version or a burnt-in master, and how many delivery formats you want at the end. Agreeing the style and holding it across a series is part of the rate. Quotes arrive itemised.

Yes, and it is a large share of our Samoan work. A same-language caption track carries the dialogue plus speaker labels and the audio that matters to the story, which is what an accessibility review checks for. The style question bites hardest on this kind of file, because the viewer is reading words they can also hear being spoken, and any gap between the two is noticed straight away.

Very much so, send it over. We spot it against picture and rebuild the line breaks, and the first thing we establish is which style it was typed in and whether that holds all the way down. Documents produced by several hands tend to drift between the two halfway through. Where you have nothing yet, we transcribe the Samoan audio here and start from that.

They will: SRT, VTT, STL and TTML, into Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut, Avid and the caption tools built into the platforms. What we ask you to check is the preview, not the import. The style decision is invisible to software, so the only place a swapped letter turns up is on screen in front of someone who reads Samoan. If the chain is long, a burnt-in master settles it.