Subtitling Essentials
Subtitles have to be accurate, brief and perfectly timed, all at once.
About this course
Subtitles have to be accurate, brief and perfectly timed, all at once. This four-day course introduces the craft of audiovisual translation, showing you how to condense speech into readable lines, respect reading speeds and break lines in the right places.
You will spend much of the course hands on, spotting and timing subtitles in professional software, dealing with the particular demands of Arabic on screen and checking your work before delivery. You leave with a finished subtitled video and an Alalamia certificate.
What you'll learn
- Explain the principles and constraints of audiovisual translation
- Condense spoken dialogue into clear, readable subtitles without losing meaning
- Apply common conventions for line length, reading speed and line breaks
- Spot and time subtitles accurately against audio and shot changes
- Use subtitling software to create, edit and export subtitle files
- Handle Arabic right-to-left display, punctuation and dialect in subtitles
- Review and quality-check a subtitled video before delivery
Curriculum
- Subtitling, dubbing and voice-over compared
- Interlingual and intralingual subtitles
- Subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- The subtitling workflow
- Characters per line and number of lines
- Reading speed and display time
- Minimum gaps and shot changes
- Positioning and on-screen text
- Condensation and reformulation
- Omission without loss of meaning
- Segmentation and line breaks
- Keeping speaker voice and register
- Reading waveforms
- Setting in and out times
- Synchronising with speech and shots
- Fixing timing errors
- Setting up a project
- Creating and editing subtitles
- Working from a template file
- Exporting common subtitle formats
- Right-to-left display and punctuation
- Modern Standard Arabic versus dialect
- Numbers, names and mixed-script text
- Cultural references and sensitive content
- Documentaries and interviews
- Drama and comedy
- Songs, humour and wordplay
- Corporate and e-learning videos
- Proofreading subtitles in context
- Technical checks and client style guides
- Final project: subtitling a short video
- Feedback and next steps
Who it's for
Translators, media professionals and content creators who want to produce professional subtitles in Arabic and English.
Before you start
- Strong command of Arabic and English
- Basic computer skills; translation experience is helpful
Part of these Alalamia diplomas
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