Swahili subtitling services

The grammar and the spelling are shared, so a Kenyan viewer follows a Tanzanian file without difficulty. What differs is vocabulary, particularly wherever English offered a word and one country took it. Over a full video those choices add up into an accent on the page, so for anything public-facing we write to one market and say which on the delivery note.

Usually the Tanzanian standard, because it is the one taught and broadcast most widely and it travels furthest beyond the two countries. If the campaign is built on Kenyan media, Kenyan talent or a Nairobi audience, the Kenyan register is the better fit. We will recommend one at the brief and keep it consistent across every video in the run.

Yes, and that is normally the shortest route. Send whatever you have: a glossary, an old subtitle file, your website. We will build the list from it so this video sounds like the last one rather than starting an argument with it. Where your existing material mixes the two conventions, we will flag the entries and ask you to choose.

Sometimes, and it depends on the audience rather than on principle. Technical, medical and financial content often reads more naturally with the English term kept, especially for a Kenyan audience. A Tanzanian public-sector or broadcast brief usually wants the Swahili form. Your subtitler decides case by case within the convention we agreed, rather than applying one rule to the whole script.

Swahili subtitling is quoted by the minute of video, from £20. Setting the terminology to your market and keeping it there is part of that rate, not an extra line. Beyond it, the figure follows running time, whether a transcript exists already, whether SDH or an open-caption master is needed, and how many output formats leave with the job. Every project is quoted on its own, with the Price Match Promise behind it.

Both. Captioning footage that is already in Swahili is what accessibility work and muted social feeds need, and translated subtitles bring other content to a Swahili audience. Captioning raises the market question in a sharper form, because a speaker from one country may be using words your audience in the other would not, and the captions have to stay faithful to what was said.

Send it over. We spot and time against what you have, and the first pass reads for consistency, since files assembled over time tend to carry terms from both countries in the same document. Where there is no transcript we produce one from the audio. Either route gets the same linguistic and technical QA before anything is delivered.

They will. Swahili SRT, VTT, STL and TTML go straight into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors, and since the language is written in ordinary Latin letters nothing is at risk in the conversion. If you would rather the wording be settled before the file leaves your hands, take a burnt-in MP4 or MOV.