Forum: Subtitling
Topic: Ask me anything about subtitling
Poster: Max Deryagin
Post title: -
[quote]Zagarella Maryrose wrote:
Hi Max!
I have a film that has a block of text a the beginning, which is on screen for one or two minutes. I think it would be nice to have a matching block of text below it, instead of normal subtitles. But it's not possible to do that in SRT, is it? I don't want to ask the client their preference, or for any guidance, because it's for a test. [/quote]
Hi Zagarella,
If it is for a test, you should have been provided with a set of subtitling guidelines/requirements by your client, and if you haven't, it would make sense to ask them for such a set. Otherwise, you need to think about how necessary this on-screen text will be for the target audience:
- Is it plot-pertinent? Does it matter for the story? If not, you don't need to subtitle it.
- Do the viewers already know what it means? (E.g. it's very simple, like "hello", and they have some fluency in the source language, like the Dutch know English) If they do, you can leave it unsubtitled.
But if this text does need to be subtitled, you definitely don't want it to linger on the screen for two whole minutes – no viewer will appreciate that. So what you can do is give it the maximum allowed duration (usually between six and eight seconds depending on the client), while making sure it doesn't overlap with any dialogue, as you don't want to display two subtitles simultaneously. Or, if the text is longer than two lines of text, you should split it into several two-line subs and give them enough display time, so that the viewers can read them before they disappear.
[Edited at 2021-05-21 05:47 GMT]
Topic: Ask me anything about subtitling
Poster: Max Deryagin
Post title: -
[quote]Zagarella Maryrose wrote:
Hi Max!
I have a film that has a block of text a the beginning, which is on screen for one or two minutes. I think it would be nice to have a matching block of text below it, instead of normal subtitles. But it's not possible to do that in SRT, is it? I don't want to ask the client their preference, or for any guidance, because it's for a test. [/quote]
Hi Zagarella,
If it is for a test, you should have been provided with a set of subtitling guidelines/requirements by your client, and if you haven't, it would make sense to ask them for such a set. Otherwise, you need to think about how necessary this on-screen text will be for the target audience:
- Is it plot-pertinent? Does it matter for the story? If not, you don't need to subtitle it.
- Do the viewers already know what it means? (E.g. it's very simple, like "hello", and they have some fluency in the source language, like the Dutch know English) If they do, you can leave it unsubtitled.
But if this text does need to be subtitled, you definitely don't want it to linger on the screen for two whole minutes – no viewer will appreciate that. So what you can do is give it the maximum allowed duration (usually between six and eight seconds depending on the client), while making sure it doesn't overlap with any dialogue, as you don't want to display two subtitles simultaneously. Or, if the text is longer than two lines of text, you should split it into several two-line subs and give them enough display time, so that the viewers can read them before they disappear.
[Edited at 2021-05-21 05:47 GMT]