subtitles

[Mark Nornes]

On Monday, October 28, 2002, at 01:12  AM, Aaron Gerow wrote:

>>> Izuchi & his producerexplained that they had actually timed the 
>>> subtitles to correspond to
>>> actualutterances, rather than having them printed & legible 
>>> throughout the entireshot.
>>
>> Could you explain this again? I'm curious, but can't make sense of it!
>
> You can sometimes fool around with the time if you need
> more time to communicate a difficult expression (starting the title
> before and/or ending it after the utterance), but some subtitling
> companies actually prefer you just keep to the time of the utterance,
> perhaps because it's just easier to manage that way.

I was just at Titra---Austria, where they do about a 3rd of the 
subtitles for German language films. One of the guys who sits in a dark 
room all day making spotting lists on a computer. If you asked him to 
come up with the rules of spotting (timing), along with the subrules 
for breaking the rule for starting and stopping with the utterance, 
he'd come up with quite the elaborate document!  But having spoken to 
lots of subbers, it's clear that on such fine points everyone comes up 
with the system they think works.

Markus