Subtitling and Captioning Editing and Proofreading Services

Subtitling is writing under constraints tighter than any other form. Two lines, roughly forty characters each, on screen long enough to be read at a speed the viewer cannot control, synchronised to speech that does not slow down for you. A speaker delivers two hundred words a minute; a viewer reads comfortably at rather less while also watching the picture. Something has to go, and deciding what goes — every few seconds, for ninety minutes — is the entire craft.

We edit what subtitling houses, captioners and broadcasters produce — interlingual subtitle files and their timing, intralingual subtitles and captions for deaf and hard of hearing viewers, live and respoken captions and their correction conventions, subtitle style guides and house specifications, reading speed and line-break rules, speaker identification and sound description conventions, guidance on handling accents, overlapping speech and untranslatable material, audio description scripts and their fit within dialogue gaps, quality standards and error classification schemes, subtitler training and onboarding material, client specifications and platform delivery requirements, and glossaries for series continuity. Our editors work to your house spec and to the platform's delivery requirements.

Condensation is the decision that defines the work, and it is made badly in two opposite directions. Subtitlers who cut too little produce text nobody finishes reading, so the viewer misses both the line and the shot; subtitlers who cut mechanically to hit a character count remove the wrong things — the hesitation that carried the character, the specific noun replaced by a general one, the joke's timing. We work on subtitle text so cutting is done by priority rather than by proportion: information the picture already supplies goes first, then repetitions and vocatives, then modifiers, and only then anything carrying character or humour. We check line breaks fall at syntactic boundaries rather than wherever the character count ran out, since a break inside a noun phrase costs the viewer a re-read they do not have time for. And we make sure a joke, a reveal or a punchline is not split across two subtitles, because the second one arrives after the audience has already seen the reaction shot.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unbroadcast material and files under embargo. We are editors rather than translators or timing specialists, and we offer no view on translation choices or on conformance with any accessibility regulation. What we can do is make subtitle text readable at speed and consistent across an entire series.