Xhosa subtitling services

No, and that surprises most people. They are written with c, x and q, plus combinations such as ch, nq, ngx and nkc, all of them ordinary letters your keyboard already produces. So a Xhosa subtitle file needs no special font, no unusual encoding and no extra handling on the technical side. The care it needs is editorial.

Because the automated part of QA cannot see the problem. Every letter is valid Latin text, so the encoding checks out, the font covers it and nothing displays incorrectly. Change one letter inside a click cluster and you have a different word in a file that still looks healthy. We put a second Xhosa reader on the text for exactly this reason.

It does, with planning. What catches people out is that one consonant can be written with three characters, so a line of Xhosa holds fewer syllables than the same number of characters would hold in English. Our subtitlers shape the sentence to the limit as they write rather than translating first and trimming afterwards.

Only with a Xhosa reader in the loop. Trimming a line for time or fixing a timecode is fine, but touching the text itself is where a click cluster loses a letter and nobody downstream notices, because the file will still open, display and validate. Send changes back to us and we will make them, or take an open-caption master so the approved wording is what ships.

Xhosa subtitling is quoted by the minute of video, from £20. The second native read is part of that rate rather than a line on the invoice. Beyond it, the figure follows running time, whether a usable transcript exists, whether you need SDH or an open-caption master, and how many output formats leave with the job. Every project is quoted on its own, with the Price Match Promise behind it.

Both, and they are separate pieces of work. Translated subtitles bring other-language content to a Xhosa audience; same-language captions and SDH make Xhosa footage accessible and make it work in a muted feed. The spelling care is identical in either direction, because in this language it is never the technology that catches an error.

Yes, send it across. We spot and time from what you provide, and the opening pass is a read rather than a validation, since an inherited Xhosa file will look clean whatever state its spelling is in. Where there is no transcript we build one from the audio. Either way the same linguistic and technical QA applies before delivery.

Without any. Xhosa SRT, VTT, STL and TTML are plain Latin text, so Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors take them straight in and nothing is lost in the conversion. If you would rather the text be settled before it reaches anyone else, we can supply a burnt-in MP4 or MOV.