Streaming-Grade Subtitling & Captioning

Welsh subtitling is a genuine niche, and it is ours by geography. We are a Cardiff agency with a Welsh team working under the same roof as our certified translation practice, which is why public bodies and producers come to us when the deliverable is Cymraeg on screen.

The demand is structural, not seasonal. S4C is the UK's only Welsh-language public service broadcaster, and Ofcom's 2025 access-services list places it at Level Two: 66 per cent of programming subtitled, with full requirements for signing and audio description. Anyone supplying S4C, or clipping its output for other platforms, needs Welsh subtitles produced and checked by people who actually read Welsh.

Public bodies in Wales carry their own duties. The Welsh Language Standards, made under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 and enforced by the Welsh Language Commissioner, require councils, national parks and the Welsh Ministers to publish documents, websites, apps and publicity in Welsh, treating Welsh no less favourably than English. The standards name documents and digital content rather than subtitles specifically, but in practice a public body publishing video meets them with Welsh-language versions and captions, and that is the work we deliver: translation into natural Welsh by our Welsh linguists, timed and formatted to your spec.

Subtitling on UK television is not optional. Ofcom's Code on Television Access Services requires most licensed channels to subtitle 80 per cent of their programmes, rising to 90 per cent for ITV1 and Channel 4 and 100 per cent for the BBC's channels, alongside audio description on 10 per cent and sign interpretation on 5 per cent. In 2025, 83 Ofcom-licensed channels carry access-service requirements; only channels with under 0.05 per cent of UK viewing are exempt.

For production companies this flows downstream: if your programme, advert or corporate film is heading to a broadcaster or a platform with access requirements, captions are part of the deliverable, and rejected caption files mean missed slots. We deliver subtitle files timed to broadcast conventions, proofread by native speakers of the subtitle language, in the format your post-production chain specifies, and when the same film needs English, Welsh, Arabic and Polish versions, all four come from one supplier with consistent timing.

A subtitle job is only finished when the file loads. We deliver the four formats that cover almost every pipeline:

• SRT (SubRip), the universal exchange format: numbered cues, an in and out timecode, the subtitle text. Accepted by YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, most players and most NLEs.
• WebVTT, the W3C standard for the web: the format HTML5 video uses through the track element, for captions, subtitles and chapter markers on your own site.
• STL (EBU Tech 3264), the long-standing broadcast subtitle exchange format that playout chains still ask for.
• EBU-TT (Tech 3350), the XML-based successor used in modern broadcast and online delivery.

Closed captions can be switched on and off by the viewer; open captions are burned into the picture and cannot. We produce both, and for right-to-left languages such as Arabic, where line breaks and punctuation reverse, the file is checked by a native reader before delivery, because an RTL subtitle file that renders backwards is the most common caption failure we are asked to repair.