Somali subtitling services

Because Somali spells with extra characters where English spells with fewer. A long vowel is the letter written twice and three consonants are two-character digraphs, so a single sound routinely costs two of the 42 positions in a line. The wording is not padded; the alphabet is just built that way. Where the result will not fit, we condense the sentence rather than let the line run past what a viewer can read.

No, and this is the one thing we will push back on. Vowel length in Somali distinguishes words, so removing the second letter does not abbreviate anything, it substitutes a different word that is spelled perfectly correctly. Because the alphabet has no accents anywhere, nothing on screen signals that a swap has happened. We find the character somewhere else in the line instead.

They will, and this is the easiest language we work in on that front. The Somali alphabet is the English letters minus p, v and z, with no diacritics at all, so a Somali subtitle file is plain ASCII. It survives any encoding it passes through, needs no special font, and cannot come back as boxes or question marks. The risks in a Somali file are all in the counting and the wording.

Normally yes. The Latin orthography adopted in 1972 is the only official one and it replaced everything in use before it, so there is no rival spelling system and no regional version of the alphabet to choose between. Vocabulary can lean one way or another, and where a script is strongly local, or aimed at diaspora viewers who read English alongside Somali, your project manager will raise it at the brief.

Somali subtitling is priced by the minute of finished video, from £20. Condensing lines properly is the bulk of the Somali-specific work and it is inside that rate rather than charged separately. The figure moves with running time, whether we transcribe before translating, whether you need 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 video into Somali subtitles is one job; same-language Somali captions and SDH for footage already in Somali is another, and we do either. The second is frequent in health, education and public information work, where the audience already follows the audio and the captions are there for accessibility, for noisy settings, or for social video that plays silently.

Yes, send it across. We spot and time against your transcript or SRT, and the first pass compares it with the audio for words where a doubled vowel has been typed single or the other way round, which is the most common thing a Somali file arrives with. Without a transcript we start from the Somali audio. Either route, the file gets the same linguistic and technical QA.

They do, with no caveats worth the name. Somali SRT, VTT, STL and TTML import into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors, and because the text is plain ASCII nothing in the chain can mangle a character. The one thing to watch is an editor that re-wraps lines to its own width and undoes breaks we placed around the sense. Burnt-in MP4 or MOV settles that permanently.