Terms of Service

These terms are between you and SubtitleFlow LTD, registered in England and Wales under company number 17459348, registered office 167-169 Great Portland Street, London, England, W1W 5PF, contactable at operations@subtitleflow.org. Where they say we or us, that is the company; where they say you, that is the person or organisation placing the order.

Where you order as a consumer, that is, for purposes outside a business, you have rights that these terms cannot take away, and nothing here tries to. Where you order in the course of a business, the places that treat the two differently say so.

One service, in four passes over your recording:

1. Transcription. The speech in your recording is written out as text, including the parts that are hard to catch on a first listen.
2. Checking. The text is read back against the recording: spelling of names, product names and technical terms as you supply them, punctuation, and the line breaks that decide how a caption reads.
3. Timing. The text is cut into cues and each cue is set against the recording, so a caption appears with the words and clears the screen before the next one is due.
4. Delivery. You receive the subtitle files your order names, and, where the order includes it, a copy of your video with the captions burned into the picture.

What an order can deliver:

• SRT file (.srt). The plainest subtitle format there is: a numbered cue, a start and end time, the lines, a blank line.
• WebVTT file (.vtt). The web format. It opens with a WEBVTT line, separates seconds from milliseconds with a full stop, and can carry cue settings.
• Video with captions burned in (.mp4). A copy of your video re-rendered with the captions drawn into the picture, in the style agreed for the order.

What no order includes:

• Translation into another language. Subtitles are produced in the language that is spoken in the recording.
• Editing of the video itself: cuts, colour, sound mixing, graphics or thumbnails.
• Live captioning of a stream, an event or a call as it happens.
• Audio description for blind and partially sighted viewers, which is a different craft with its own standards.

1. You describe the video, by email or through the form on the contact page.
2. We look at it and send a written quotation: what is included, the total, the number of rounds of changes, and the date the files are due.
3. You accept that quotation in writing.
4. We reply with an order confirmation. That confirmation is the contract, and there is no contract before it: an enquiry commits neither of us, and a quotation is an offer you are free to leave unanswered.

A quotation holds good for the period stated on it. After that it may be reissued, because the work it describes has to fit into whatever else is running.

Prices are in pounds sterling (GBP). The quotation names one total figure. That figure includes any tax due on it, and nothing is added to it afterwards: no handling charge, no delivery charge, no surcharge for paying by one method rather than another.

The figure is worked out against your recording, from the running time, the state of the sound, the number of voices, what you need back and the caption style. No figure is published on this site, because a published figure cannot know any of that.

Payment is arranged from the order confirmation: by bank transfer against an invoice, by card, or through PayPal, using the secure payment link in the email. Whether anything is payable before the work starts is set out in the quotation for that order.

This website has no checkout and takes no payments. Card details are entered on the payment provider's own page, are handled by that provider, and never reach us, so we neither see nor store them.

Where an invoice is not paid by its due date, we may hold delivery of files not yet handed over until it is. Interest on a late commercial payment is as the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 provides, and that applies only to business orders.

• The recording, by whatever route you name, in a condition it can be worked from.
• The spellings that matter: names, places, products, abbreviations and terms, and a script if one exists.
• Answers to the questions that come up mid-file, and your approval at whatever stages the quotation sets.
• A confirmation, by sending it, that you are entitled to send that recording to us and to have captions made from it, including as regards anybody appearing or speaking on it and anybody who holds rights in it.

Where any of that does not arrive, the due date moves by at least as long as the wait. We will tell you when that happens rather than letting a date pass quietly.

The files named in the order confirmation, by email, or by a download link where they are too large to attach. Nothing is posted: there is nothing physical in an order.

The due date is in the quotation and repeated in the confirmation. It runs from the day the recording, the spellings and anything payable up front are all with us. Where no date has been agreed and you order as a consumer, the work is carried out within a reasonable time, as section 52 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires.

The work is carried out with reasonable care and skill. What we do not promise is that any given recording can yield a complete caption file: where speech cannot be made out, it is marked as such rather than guessed at, and that is described on the page about your video.

Corrections to spelling, timing, line breaks or caption style are what the rounds of changes in your quotation are for, and they are free within that number.

A change to the video itself is a different thing: recutting it moves every cue after the cut, so a new version means a new timing pass, quoted separately. The same applies to adding a format after delivery, and to a burned-in video that has to be rendered again after the picture has changed.

Neither of us has to accept a change the other proposes. What is agreed is agreed in writing, including what it does to the total and to the date.

If you order as a consumer you have a statutory right to cancel within 14 days of the contract being made, and how that works, what happens when you have asked us to start inside those 14 days, and how a refund is paid are set out in full on the Delivery & Refunds page, which forms part of these terms.

On a business order there is no statutory cancellation right. You may still cancel in writing at any time before delivery, and what is payable is the work done up to the moment we are told, with anything paid beyond that returned.

Where you order as a consumer, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you rights that these terms cannot exclude or restrict, and this clause does not replace them:

• the work must be carried out with reasonable care and skill (section 49), and if it is not, you may require it to be done again, or a reduction in the price;
• anything said about the service that you took into account becomes a term of the contract (section 50);
• the files, as digital content, must be of satisfactory quality, fit for a purpose you made known to us, and as described (sections 34 to 36).

Detailed guidance on consumer rights is published by Citizens Advice at citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer.

• Your recording stays yours. Sending it gives us permission to work on it for your order and nothing more.
• The finished files become yours once they are paid for, outright and without limit: publish them, edit them, translate them, hand them to another supplier, use them anywhere and for as long as you like.
• Before payment, what you have is permission to check the files, not to publish them.
• We keep no right to show your work. Neither your video nor your caption files appear anywhere as an example of ours without your written permission, asked for separately and refusable without consequence.
• Our own working methods, templates and style settings remain ours, which does not touch anything in the files you receive.

We will decline, or stop, an order where the recording:

• is unlawful to possess or to distribute, or would make us party to something unlawful;
• you are not entitled to send, or where somebody else's rights in it plainly have not been dealt with;
• is material we are not prepared to work on, which we will say straight away rather than accepting the order and going quiet.

Where that happens before work starts, anything paid is returned in full. Where it comes to light during the work, we stop, tell you why, and charge only for what was done before we knew.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded, including the rights given to consumers by the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

Subject to that: we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking this contract or of failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss or damage that was not foreseeable, which means neither obvious at the time nor something both of us knew about when the contract was made.

On a business order, our total liability for any one order is limited to the amount paid for that order, and we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, interruption to business or loss of anticipated savings, however caused.

Captions are checked before delivery, and they are checked again by you before you publish them. What is published, and where, is your decision, and this clause does not make us the publisher of it.

You may end an order as set out above. We may end one where an invoice stays unpaid after we have asked for it in writing, where what we need from you does not arrive after we have asked twice, or where this clause on what we will not take on applies.

When an order ends, whatever has been done is paid for and anything paid beyond that is returned. Where you have paid for work that was finished, the files for it are handed over: we do not hold finished work back as leverage.

Write to operations@subtitleflow.org, or to the registered office. Say what is wrong and what you would like done about it. Every complaint is acknowledged in writing and answered in full within 14 days; where it needs longer, we say so inside those 14 days and say when to expect the answer.

We do not belong to an alternative dispute resolution scheme, so none is named here. If we cannot settle it between us, you remain free to take the matter to court.

The edition that applies to your order is the one in force on the day your order confirmation was sent, and we send a copy of it on request. A changed page is published here with a new date at the head of it.

We do not change the terms of an order that is already running. Where something has to change mid-order, it is agreed with you in writing or it does not happen.

These terms and any contract under them are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over any dispute.

Where you order as a consumer and live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may bring proceedings in the courts there, and you keep the protection of the mandatory rules of the law where you live. Nothing in this clause takes a consumer's rights away.