Subtitling Translations including SRT and STL formats

Adelphi Translations have been providing subtitling translation services for over 15 years. We provide the translations through to the final subtitled video ready for publication.

Many of the industry standard subtitle production software will not work with right to left languages such as Arabic. Adelphi offer subtitling translation services in all video formats from videos such as Mov, MPEG-2, WMV, flv, etc.

As well as providing subtitling translation services for video, Adelphi Translations have been involved in many projects which required ‘same language captions’, which are basically subtitles intended as an aid to deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers.

Below are subtitle samples in various languages, click on the video you wish to watch.

Adelphi Studio

Our new website ‘Adelphi Studio‘ which is dedicated to our voice-over and subtitling services is now live, to see more voice-over and subtitling samples please click on the link above or select a language from the drop down menu and you will be taken to the site.

Adelphi Studio


Open and closed caption subtitling translation services

Adelphi always produce all their subtitles in-house and never outsource any of the work therefore maintaining confidentiality as well as quality.

There are two basic methods of producing foreign language subtitles. The subtitles can be ‘burned’ onto the video, which means they cannot be turned on or off and are always visible. They become part of the video file itself. Although using this method means that multiple languages cannot be selected using the same file it is possible to produce multiple versions of the video with different subtitles which can be selected by the user, for example by clicking on different links on a web page. For more sophisticated format such as DVD the format allows multiple channels of subtitles (and audio) to be created as separate streams on the disc. These can be switched on and off through the selection menu created in the authoring process. At Adelphi Translations we can re-author your DVD to include subtitles and foreign language audio tracks if you can provide us with the original video or the original DVD.Our subtitling translation services produce switchable foreign language subtitles programmatically. In Adobe Flash, for example, subtitles can be created in an XML file which can then be linked to the Flash movie. An XML file can be created for each language and these can be selected using links in the Flash movie itself.

For DVD authoring the subtitle file is essentially a text file with timing information included. The screen shot below shows and example of such a file. In this particular subtitle format there is a subtitle number, followed by the start time of the line, a separator ( –> ) the end time of the line  and then, after a line-break, the lines themselves. This is the .srt format.

Subtitling translation services

Subtitle-file showing the time-codes in Notepad

The process itself is not complicated but, unfortunately, there is a bewildering range of subtitle file formats which differ from each other in the way the text file is formatted. The differences may be small, such as the format of the time-code itself, or the use of line-breaks, tabs, spaces etc., to separate the individual subtitles, but it is important to know exactly which format of subtitle file your authoring tool will accept.

Subtitling translation services

Just some of the dozens of foreign language subtitle file formats ….

The subtitles are produced using a variety of software. Some are better at handling right-to-left languages for Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Kurdish, Hebrew and Urdu subtitles, while others handle Unicode well, for subtitles in exotic scripts such as Thai, Tamil or Amharic. Whatever your requirement we can produce a subtitle file to suit your video and software. Russian and other Eastern European subtitles such as Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Belarusian use the Cyrillic alphabet. The main issue with these is the length of text when compared to the original English. Central European languages such as Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian use an extended version of the Latin alphabet. Only Greek is the non-Latin alphabet in Western Europe. Subtitling is a straight-forward concept which can be a practical nightmare so why not let Adelphi Translations handle the project from transcription to translation and subtitle production?


Adelphi has offices in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA).
For all UK and International enquiries please contact our UK office tel: +44 (0)114 272 3772 or email: sales@adelphistudio.com.
For US, Canada and South America enquiries please contact our office in California tel: 916 414 8714 or email: us@adelphistudio.com

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