Gaelic Subtitling Services

Yes. Scottish Gaelic is spoken in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and Nova Scotia in Canada, and Scottish Gaelic subtitling is done by native speakers of the language, never by English-speaking staff working phonetically. The finished text is written in Latin script with grave accents, so it stays searchable and quotable afterwards. The same timed file can produce a burned-in version and a sidecar caption file in one order.

Yes. Here is what catches non-specialists out in Scottish Gaelic: initial consonant mutation changes how words sound at the start, so spelling cannot be guessed from the audio. Files go to someone from the matching region instead of whoever is free, because a specialist hears words a general speaker guesses at. Tell us where the speakers are from when you send the material and it is routed accordingly.

Most often oral histories, cultural and heritage programmes, community and council recordings. Each type carries its own conventions - speaker labels for interviews, timestamps for legal material, clean formatting for anything published - and those are agreed before work starts. Most of the work here is for teams with an accessibility requirement to meet, not simply a preference.

In Latin script with grave accents. Written properly, the Scottish Gaelic output can be searched, quoted and reused by anyone who reads the language; typed phonetically by a non-speaker, it cannot. A translated caption track is timed separately, because reading speed differs between languages.

Yes. The Scottish Gaelic subtitling is produced first, then a professional translator works from it, so you receive both files and can check one against the other. Audio and video translation is $7 per minute. Where a certified transcript has to accompany the caption file, that is priced per page.

Scottish Gaelic has a smaller pool of qualified subtitlers than the major languages, so availability is confirmed before you pay and not promised then rescheduled. Most requests are placed within hours; where the wait would be longer, you are told at quoting stage. A single short video is a normal order here, including a trailer or a social cut.

Subtitling starts at $11.20 per minute of runtime. What moves the figure is the runtime, how many target languages you need and whether the file has to be timed from scratch, so the quote is built from your actual files and not from a rate card. The rate follows the runtime of the video, not the number of caption lines the finished file contains. Scottish Gaelic sits outside the commonly requested languages, so availability is confirmed before the quote is issued and not after you have paid. You get an exact total in writing before anything starts.

It depends on length and on how difficult the source is, and the time is in the quote before you commit. Rush delivery within 2 to 24 hours covers the urgent end. Timing is set by hand against the audio, so the schedule follows the real runtime of the video and not an estimate. Scottish Gaelic material with heavy code-switching takes longer to work through than clean single-speaker source, and the date you are given reflects that.

The 99+% accuracy standard comes from human work plus an independent check: one subtitler produces the file, and then a second reviewer plays the file back against the picture. Every file is played back on screen before release, because a caption that reads correctly can still land on the wrong shot. The reviewer on each Scottish Gaelic file checks names and terms against the source instead of reading the text through, because this material is full of names nobody can guess at. That second pass is what catches a caption a second out of sync or a line left running across a cut.

Only the people doing the work can open your material, and all of them are under NDA. Scottish Gaelic files often carry names, addresses and case references, so access stays with the assigned subtitler and the reviewer. Unreleased video is routine here, so review links are restricted and nothing is held longer than the project needs. Transfer is encrypted in both directions, and deletion on an agreed schedule can be set up where your records require it.