Sinhala subtitling services

Because that is how the script is read, even though the file keeps them the other way round. The kombuva, U+0DD9, is typed after its consonant and drawn to the left of it, and four other vowel signs come apart into halves that sit on either side of the letter. A shaping engine reorders the sequence at display time. Marks turning up in odd positions point at that engine rather than at the subtitler.

That depends on the font and the engine behind it, which is exactly why we test instead of assuming. A Sinhala conjunct is formed by an al-lakuna and a zero-width joiner, and the font has to carry the substitution features that act on that pair. We open the delivered file in the player or encoder you name and read the result there. Tell us the target at the brief and the check is built into the job.

Yes, and burn-in is often the calmer route for this script. Once the text is part of the picture the reordering has already happened at our end, and every downstream player is simply playing video. We render the master, watch it back, and confirm that clusters, split vowel signs and bound consonant forms are drawn correctly. You get the master as MP4, MOV or ProRes with the Sinhala fixed in place.

Not one we can point you at. The platform style guides published for South Asian languages cover Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi and Bangla, and Sinhala is not among them. So we publish our own defaults and say plainly that they are defaults: forty-two characters, two lines, seventeen characters a second, one second minimum. Where your broadcaster sets a spec of its own, that wins and we build the file to it.

The rate opens at £20 for each minute of video, and the display checks this script needs sit inside that figure rather than on top of it. Running time drives most of the total. A transcript, an SDH pass, burnt-in output and each further delivery format push it up from there. Pricing is itemised per job, and our Price Match Promise stands behind whatever we send you.

That is standard work here. Where the soundtrack is already Sinhala we caption it in Sinhala, adding SDH where speaker labels and sound description are wanted, which is what accessibility teams generally ask for and what keeps a video usable in a feed playing without sound. A transcript is produced first, and the display pass runs on those files exactly as it does on translated ones.

Usually. Your file becomes the starting point: we re-spot it to picture, adjust any line running long once it is drawn, and restore joiners that a previous export has dropped. Flag it early if the text has been through a converter or a legacy font, because those arrive with clusters already broken and take longer to put right. Where no transcript exists at all, we write one from the audio.

The usual set. Our VTT, SRT, STL and TTML deliverables open in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and the browser-based editors with the Sinhala intact. They will not all shape the text identically, though, so if the edit suite is where the subtitles end up being burned in, say so and we will check what comes out of that suite as well.

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.