Tagalog subtitling services

It is what the platform guidance asks for. The Filipino style guide says the language on screen should be what native speakers use day to day, familiar rather than outdated or overly formal, and it tells subtitlers to leave common English words alone instead of swapping in formal or archaic Filipino. A file written in purely literary Filipino reads as a translation of the dialogue rather than a record of it.

Either name reaches the same subtitler. Tagalog is the regional language of Manila and the provinces around it; Filipino is the national standard built on Tagalog and named as such in the 1987 constitution, and it is the label most platforms print on a delivery spec. Tell us which word your spec sheet uses and the metadata is matched to it, because the text itself comes out the same either way.

By what the speaker said and by what the line can hold. Anything chosen deliberately in English stays in English and is spelled as English rather than respelled by ear, so okay does not turn into okey. Where a stretch of English was incidental and the cue is tight against forty-two characters, the subtitler weighs that switch against the reading speed and keeps whichever version survives on screen.

Yes. The Filipino guidance is explicit that common English words are not to be translated or replaced with formal or archaic Filipino, and that holds for SDH exactly as it holds for a translated file. It also says not to raise a forced narrative over Filipino dialogue that already carries everyday English, since the audience understands it. So a viewer with partial hearing reads text that still lines up with what they pick out of the mix.

Pricing goes by running time, starting at £20 a minute. Mixed English and Filipino audio takes longer to transcribe accurately than a single-language track, because every switch has to be captured as spoken before a cue can be timed, and on longer pieces that shows up in the quote. Transcription, SDH, burnt-in delivery and the number of formats move it too. Every quote is itemised, with our Price Match Promise behind it.

Same-language captioning is core work here. We take the Philippine audio as it stands and put accurate text on screen, English switches and all, with SDH on top where deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers are part of the audience. Because the words are being written down rather than rendered into another language, the spelling rule does more work on these files than on any other kind we produce.

That works, and it saves a step. Working from what you send, we re-spot and re-time, tighten any line running past the limit, and read the English through for phonetic respellings an earlier pass may have introduced. Auto-generated captions in particular tend to mangle the switch points, guessing at a Filipino word where an English one was said. If you would rather start clean, we transcribe the audio first.

The usual set. SRT and VTT go to the web players, STL and TTML to broadcast, and all of them open in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and the browser-based editors with the mixed text intact and no stray substitutions at the switch points. If you would rather not manage a subtitle track at all, we burn the text into the picture and hand back a finished MP4 or MOV.