Subtitling Prices

Here's why quality matters

Exceptional subtitles amplify your content's entertainment value, broaden its potential reach, and ultimately, make a significant return on investment. Foreign businesses spend $90 billion annually trying to reach global audiences, and with 4.3 billion people not understanding English, subtitles can be a significant boon for your bottom line.

Crowdsourced subtitling and cheap localization services are both time-consuming to manage and frequently of poor quality. In contrast, professional subtitlers and localization experts charge extra for their services, but the additional costs will enhance the content and attract more customers from other countries.

Even if you still have a cheap subtitling service in mind, our detailed pricing breakdown below will show you how and where they cut corners to keep costs low. There are four steps involved in creating professional foreign-language subtitles: Transcription, Spotting, Translation and Encoding. Let's take a look at each of these processes and the individual rates.

from $2 per minute

Spotting involves splitting the transcript into separate lines with the in and out timestamps. These timestamps record the hours:minutes:seconds:frames and tell the video software when to display/remove the subtitle. Most modern transcription tools allow subtitlers to do the spotting task simultaneously as they create the transcript.

from $13 per minute

Audiovisual translation for subtitling is a technical and creative task best completed by qualified translators. Subtitling translators will accurately convey colloquialisms, humour or technical subject matter to non-native audiences. This task may also require condensing the translation to match subtitling guidelines.