I spend a lot of time working with subtitles and thinking about subtitles, about how to make them easy to read and understand so they distract minimally from the visual storytelling. Here are some rules I’ve come up with that you can ignore at your peril (a few are more to my aesthetic taste rather than hard rules.) One thing to bear in mind, which you’ll discover as soon as you start, is that it takes longer to read something than it takes to say it, so we’re always fighting to keep our subtitles on screen for an extra moment whenever we can. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to follow a speaker’s point and the subtitle disappearing before you can read it. By using every trick we can and tweaking and fighting for every frame and moment, you can make the experience as transparent as possible for your viewer.
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I have a question about subtitles not for language translation but for hard-to-hear dialogue.
Is there a rule to be followed if only one part of a scene is inaudible? Should the subtitles remain consistent throughout the scene regardless? I know this is done on alot of television documentaries but I was wondering what your thoughts on this topic were.
Posted by TinkerTenor on Saturday, October 13, 2007 @ 03:46 PM
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