Mam Subtitling Services

Yes. Mam is spoken in the western highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas in southern Mexico, and Mam 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 the glottal stop marked by an apostrophe, 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. With Mam, the recurring difficulty is this: a Mayan language with glottalised consonants and marked valley-to-valley variation, and most speakers also use some Spanish. 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.

Yes, and both files are delivered together so the English can be read against the Mam original and not taken on trust. Audio and video translation is $7 per minute, and certified document translation is $25 per page. Where a certified transcript has to accompany the caption file, that is priced per page.

Usually, but it is confirmed and not assumed. Mam has fewer qualified subtitlers than the major languages, so the quote goes out only once someone is actually free to take it. If the realistic start is two days out, you hear that up front. 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, with volume pricing once a project passes an agreed size. The quote for Mam subtitling is worked out from the runtime, how many target languages you need and whether the file has to be timed from scratch. Mam sits outside the commonly requested languages, so availability is confirmed before the quote is issued and not after you have paid. The rate follows the runtime of the video, not the number of caption lines the finished file contains. Send the material and the figure comes back within minutes.

Rush delivery within 2 to 24 hours is available, and the delivery time is confirmed in writing before you pay. Mam material with heavy code-switching takes longer to work through than clean single-speaker source, and the date you are given reflects that. Timing is set by hand against the audio, so the schedule follows the real runtime of the video and not an estimate. If a deadline cannot be met you are told at quoting stage, not on the day.

The standard is 99+%, reached by doing the job twice: one person produces the file, and a second checks it before release. The reviewer on each Mam 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.

Only the people doing the work can open your material, and all of them are under NDA. Mam files often carry names, addresses and case references, so access stays with the assigned subtitler and the reviewer. Transfer is encrypted in both directions, and deletion on an agreed schedule can be set up where your records require it.

Most often asylum and immigration interviews, court hearings, clinic and community 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 the glottal stop marked by an apostrophe, as a reader of Mam would expect to see it. The finished file is real text, not an image or a phonetic approximation, so your team can search it, paste from it and quote it. A translated caption track is timed separately, because reading speed differs between languages.