Foreign language subtitles and English captions in 326 languages — SRT, VTT, or burned-in files.
Subtitling services add timed, readable text to video. Prism Linguistics creates foreign language subtitles, English captions, and SDH in 326 languages for corporate video, film, e-learning, social clips, and legal evidence, delivered as SRT, VTT, or burned-in files. Quotes are free and arrive within 60 minutes during business hours.
Good subtitles are quiet craft. The text has to be accurate, broken at natural points, and on screen long enough to read without lagging the picture. Done well, nobody notices. Done badly, it’s all anyone notices.
Last reviewed August 23, 2026 by the Prism Linguistics editorial team.
Subtitles assume the viewer can hear the audio but doesn’t speak the language, so they translate the dialogue. Closed captions assume the viewer can’t hear the audio, so they stay in the same language and add the sound cues a Deaf or hard-of-hearing viewer would otherwise miss: [door slams], [phone ringing], who’s speaking off screen.
Ordering the wrong one usually means paying for the job twice; this table saves that.
| Feature | Subtitles | Closed captions |
|---|---|---|
| Who they serve | Viewers who can hear but don’t speak the language | Viewers who can’t hear the audio, or watch on mute |
| Language | Translated into the viewer’s language | Same language as the audio |
| Sound cues | Not included | Included: [applause], [phone ringing], speaker IDs |
| Typical use | International distribution, multilingual training | ADA and Section 508 compliance, social video |
SDH (subtitles for the Deaf and hard of hearing) is the hybrid: translated dialogue plus sound cues. We produce all three.
The brief changes with the audience, so we ask before we start.
Town halls, onboarding, and safety training subtitled for multilingual US workforces. Part of our business translation services.
Features, shorts, and festival cuts subtitled to platform conventions. More on our media translation page.
Short-form video for YouTube, LinkedIn, and paid social, where most viewers watch on mute and burned-in captions usually win.
Course modules and lecture capture, captioned for accessibility and subtitled for multilingual cohorts. Pairs with localization for on-screen text.
Foreign-language footage subtitled into English for court use, handled under NDA. More on our legal interpreting and translation page.
A subtitle is not a sentence of translation with a timestamp attached. People speak English at roughly 150 words a minute; comfortable reading on screen, while also watching the picture, runs a good deal slower. So the subtitler has to carry the meaning in fewer words than the speaker used.
Condensing has to be done honestly. Cut the wrong word from a safety warning or a deposition answer and it stops meaning what the speaker said. Cut nothing and the viewer is still reading line two as the next sentence starts.
A strong document translator can produce subtitles that are perfectly accurate and completely unreadable at speed. Subtitle translation is translation plus editing plus timing, done by someone who thinks in cues rather than paragraphs, written against the picture rather than lifted from a translated transcript.
The finished job is a file, and the right file depends on where the video is going. SRT is the workhorse almost every player and platform accepts, and the safe default. VTT is the HTML5 standard, with more styling and positioning control, preferred by most web players.
Burned-in subtitles (open captions) are rendered permanently into the picture. Every viewer sees them and nobody can switch them off, which suits social feeds and any platform that won’t carry a separate subtitle file. The catch: they can’t be corrected without a fresh export, and each language needs its own version of the video. Send the destination platform with your quote request and the files will drop straight in.
Both directions are routine. English-to-foreign: a safety training video subtitled into Spanish for a distribution center in Houston. Foreign-to-English: deposition testimony in Portuguese subtitled for a New York law firm’s trial bundle. Spanish is our most requested pairing; our Spanish translation services page covers it in depth, and the full language list covers the rest.
Foreign language subtitling always goes to a native speaker who has subtitled before. If the video sits inside a broader product or course, localization covers the interface strings and on-screen text around it.
For public-sector and publicly funded video, captions are usually an obligation. Section 508 requires federal agencies, and in practice most federally funded programs, to caption video. ADA obligations for public-facing video generally point to WCAG 2.1 AA, which calls for captions on prerecorded content; universities, school districts, and city governments are cited most often over uncaptioned video.
Plain subtitles don’t satisfy these requirements, because they omit the sound cues; the compliant deliverable is captions or SDH. And auto-generated captions that mangle names and technical terms rarely hold up as an accommodation. We produce human-made caption files that do.
Four steps; only the first needs anything from you.
Upload the file or share a private link through the quote form. Tell us the runtime, the source language, the languages you need, and where the video will be published. We reply with a firm quote within 60 minutes during business hours.
Everything spoken is captured accurately first, with speaker changes marked. If you already have a checked transcript, send it and we start from there.
The text is split into cues, condensed to fit reading-speed limits, broken at natural grammatical points, and timed to the speech and shot changes. Translated subtitles are written at this stage so the wording is shaped to fit the screen.
A second linguist checks the file against the picture, then we export SRT, VTT, or a burned-in version. Send a revision list if anything needs adjusting and we turn it around.
There is no flat industry rate, but as a US market guide, same-language captions typically run $1 to $3 per video minute and translated subtitles typically run $7 to $15 per video minute per language. Your quote confirms the exact price. Four things move it:
Deadline sits on top of all four; genuinely urgent work carries a premium. And if what you really want is a written record rather than text on screen, that’s transcription, which costs less: video transcription for footage, audio transcription for interviews and meetings.
Send the footage, the languages, and where it will be shown. We’ll quote within 60 minutes during business hours.
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