Subtitle / Caption Translation

Subtitling Translators and Services

@International Services makes do-it-yourself online subtitling software that is fun and easy to use. Alternatively, @IS provides any service you may require for subtitling your web video, DVD or YouTube video. Moreover, the @IS Directory of Translators links to tested subtitling translation professionals. Whatever services you need, from breaking down the original movie into subtitles with timecodes to translating subtitles and laying the subtitles to the video - whatever you cannot handle yourself, you will find the tools and the people that you need at @International Services.

You may also wish to consider use of our simple online software to support you during the subtitling process. The software is at SubtitleYourVideo.com. This web software handles many of the complex elements of subtitling, making subtitling an easy experience for newbies and professionals alike. Subtitle Your Video also provides a translation center for translators to do their job right online and at the same time assures that the subtitle elements are exactly as required.

Captioning translation

Many companies have what are called "captioning files" for translation. These are special text files that drive the black-box "subtitles" that can be turned on and off at the bottom of the screen. These captions can appear in other languages. Also, these same captioning files can be used as the basis for conversion into subtitling. Such files import easily into the Subtitle Your Video software so that translators can translate over video - or they can translate inside an MS Word file with tables that is compatible with professional translation memory software (Trados).

@International Services also offers helpful web software specifically for this purpose called Translate Your Captions. The software has all of the elements to assure an excellent job during translation, and it exports your choice of the foreign language file either for re-import into captioning software or exports subtitling elements for Flash, web,YouTube or DVD.

What is subtitling?

Subtitling is real-time written translation of a video or movie, appearing as text on the lower third of the screen. Subtitling is popular for DVD, CD-ROM, video and other multimedia use. @International Services is pleased to assist studios and developers to subtitle in-house, or can lay the subtitles in a partner studio and return a finished Master to client. @IS often brings together corporate clients and developer-clients, creating customized subtitling solutions ideal for the project.

Subtitling as an affordable solution

Where once subtitling could only be done on huge, expensive machines, today there are outstanding multilingual subtitling software packages "for the desktop". This accessibility and user-friendliness has removed the prohibitive cost from the process of subtitling, making it affordable in multiple languages. Even Asian languages have become easy to use, and can be included in the subtitling project plans despite "2-byte" characteristics. The problems with characters that were incompatible with English systems in the past are fading.

Methods and edit lists for in-house use

There are several different approaches to placing foreign text on screen as subtitles. These approaches involve various types of "edit lists". An edit list is a file that provides the exact time code in-points and out-points for each subtitle. Some edit lists contain the subtitle text (the words that will appear at the bottom of the screen) inside the edit list itself as an additional column of that edit list, which text will be laid by the software on screen at the time indicated in the edit list. These "text edit lists" automatically create subtitles in almost any ABC language plus the major Asian languages Chinese, Japanese and Korean, without need for massive numbers of graphic art files, as in the past. The software does the work, and correctly places the text. These "text edit lists" are appropriate for software such as DVD Studio Pro, Adobe, Sonic and others.

Other types of edit lists trigger graphic "art files" (TGA, TIFF or PCT) to appear on screen according to the time codes. This "art file" method works well for languages such as rarer Asian and Middle Eastern that are incompatible with most developer's software, but is more complex than the "text edit list" approach. Customized edit lists are provided to the developer, plus the graphic art files that are ready to use, with text properly styled, sized and placed.

Laying subtitles

There are approximately 700 subtitles in a 30 minute show. 1400 per hour. @International Services has an automated process for any one of 40 "text edit lists", and for creating hundreds of subtitle "art files" in a very short space of time. The sheer volume of subtitles was formerly intimidating, but the customized edit lists now assure quick and painless results. @IS is pleased to walk developers through their first subtitling experience. The developer will lose several hours during the first experience, mostly in discovering features related to software and equipment with which they may already be familiar, but which special features were not used in the past. Once the first learning experience has been surmounted, subtitling becomes a smooth process.