Zulu subtitling services

Because the software ran out of line and cut where the count ended. Zulu writes a whole clause as one word, so a cue can hold a fourteen or seventeen character string with no space inside it, and an automatic wrap has nowhere legal to go. A Zulu subtitler rewrites the cue so the break lands between words instead, which usually means shortening the sentence rather than moving the break.

Not more characters, fewer places to divide them. The same meaning often occupies a similar count, but it arrives as two or three long strings instead of six short ones, so the 42 character limit bites sooner in practice. That is why we plan the line structure while translating rather than translating first and wrapping afterwards.

Yes, and it is worth reading. Netflix publishes a Zulu timed text style guide that sets the character limit and reading speeds, and then goes on to insist that words are written conjunctively, with its own before and after examples. It also tells subtitlers not to reproduce English compound sentences in Zulu. We follow it unless your own spec says otherwise.

Not to a standard you would ship. The output tends to split written words into their grammatical pieces, which is precisely the error the style guide singles out, and it lands on every line rather than occasionally. We treat machine output as a rough timing pass at best, and a native Zulu subtitler writes the text that goes on screen.

Zulu subtitling is quoted by the minute of video, from £20. Planning the line structure around the written word is part of that rate, not an extra. What moves the figure is running time, whether we transcribe before translating, whether you need SDH or an open-caption master, and how many output formats leave with the job. Every project gets its own quote, backed by the Price Match Promise.

Yes, and it is a large share of what we do here. Same-language Zulu captions and SDH are what accessibility teams ask for and what carries a muted social feed. The line break question is if anything sharper in this direction, because there is no translation stage where somebody would have reshaped the sentence to fit the screen.

Gladly. We spot and time against what you send, and the first thing we look at is how its lines were divided, since inherited Zulu files very often carry breaks made by a character counter. If there is no transcript we build one from the audio first. Either route gets the same linguistic and technical QA before delivery.

They will. Zulu SRT, VTT, STL and TTML open in Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and the browser-based editors with our line divisions intact. One thing to watch is any editor set to re-wrap text on import, since that undoes the work. Burnt-in MP4 or MOV removes the question entirely.