Spanish subtitling services

For plain dialogue it often can. It stops working the moment a number appears. Spain writes 2,50 where Latin America writes 2.50, Spain sets 18:00 where Latin America follows the source with a. m. and p. m., and the currency changes with the market. None of that throws an error, so the file passes QC and still reads as imported. Where budget allows we produce the two as separate deliverables from one spotting pass, which costs far less than doing it twice.

The opening mark belongs where the question begins, which is often not where the sentence begins — Pedro, ¿cuántos años tienes? A subtitle then splits that sentence across cues, and the mark has to move with the question rather than sit at the top of the cue. Automatic tools drop it or default it to the first character, and the viewer is left with an answer mark that never opened.

Whichever the market takes. Vosotros is standard in Spain and absent from Latin America, where ustedes covers both. For a release that has to travel across Latin America the guides ask for a neutral register, so we keep regional forms out — including the voseo you would hear in Buenos Aires or Montevideo — unless your brief is specifically for that country.

It needs more characters, which is not the same thing. The line stays at 42 and the reading speed stays at 17 a second, so what gives is the wording. A subtitler condenses while spotting, keeping the register and the timing of the joke and dropping what the picture already tells you. Translate first and time afterwards and you get a file that is technically valid and unreadable.

From £15 per minute of video, and Spanish sits in our first rate band alongside French, German, Italian and Portuguese. The figure moves with running time, with whether the audio needs transcribing before anyone can translate it, with SDH or a burnt-in master, and with how many output formats leave with the job. Every quote is itemised and carries the Price Match Promise.

Yes, and a good share of our Spanish work is exactly that. Same-language captions and SDH for accessibility, for compliance and for muted social feeds are a separate discipline from translating into Spanish, and we staff them separately — a captioner working from Spanish audio is listening for speaker changes and sound cues, not for equivalents.

Send it over. We spot and time against what you have, reading it back against the audio as we go — scripts drift from what was actually said, and in Spanish the drift usually shows up as punctuation that was never in the original. We will also flag any figures written for the wrong market before they reach the screen.

All the usual ones. SRT, VTT, STL and TTML carry accents, ñ and the inverted marks intact into Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Camtasia and the main online editors and players. If you would rather not manage a separate file, we burn the subtitles into a finished MP4 or MOV instead.