Sotho subtitling services

Whichever one your audience reads every day. The two standards spell ordinary words differently, so a Maseru viewer and a Bloemfontein viewer will each find the other version slightly off, line after line. We ask at the brief, write the whole file to that answer, and note it in the delivery so the next project matches this one.

It can be understood on both sides, and for internal or training material that is usually enough. For anything public-facing, broadcast or branded, we would rather produce the version your primary market reads, because the spelling differences turn up in everyday vocabulary rather than in rare words. Where both markets matter equally, we build the second version from the first.

Yes, but not with a script. Some of it is letter for letter, and then you reach the diacritics one standard writes and the other does not, the hyphens in compound words, and the places where the two split a word differently. A native subtitler reads the whole file. What comes out is a proper second version rather than a search and replace.

Because Sotho sets most of its grammar down as separate words, so a short English phrase can arrive as four or five of them, and the spaces between them count towards the character limit like any other character. It is not padding and it is not a translator being wordy. We work the sentence to the line as we write it, rather than trimming once it has overrun.

Sotho subtitling is quoted by the minute of video, from £20. Agreeing and holding a single written standard across the file is part of that rate, not an addition. What moves the figure is running time, whether we transcribe before translating, whether you need SDH or an open-caption master, and how many formats leave with the job. Every project is quoted individually, with the Price Match Promise behind it.

Both, and they are different jobs. Captioning Sotho audio in Sotho is what accessibility teams and muted social feeds need; translated subtitles bring other content to a Sotho audience. The standards question applies to both, and in captioning it is often sharper, since the speaker on screen may be using one variety while your audience reads the other.

Please send it. We spot and time against what you have, and the opening check is which standard it was written in, because inherited Sotho files quite often mix the two after passing through several hands. Where no transcript exists we produce one from the audio. Either route gets the same linguistic and technical QA before it ships.

They do. SRT, VTT, STL and TTML in Sotho open in Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors, with the marks that the Lesotho standard uses coming through intact. If your delivery chain strips accented characters anywhere, tell us and we will supply a burnt-in MP4 or MOV instead.