Condensed Subtitles

[UpsetSmiley]

Originally Posted by MichaelB

I feel your pain, but it's unavoidable. People, on average, process printed words slower than they process verbal ones, and if you're subtitling someone talking a mile a minute, you have to "slow down" the subtitles if they're not to become so cluttered and rapidly delivered that they're effectively useless. It's a very tricky balancing act, and now that I do a lot of subtitling myself I can really appreciate the skill and tact that it demands.

Let's take a film that i subtitled 100% myself from transcription to delivery: Russ Meyer's The Seven Minutes. Problem number one is that it's insanely talky - even outside the courtroom scenes that must take up half the running time. So even allowing for two-line subtitles that go as wide as the system allows (since there's a character limit), I found I often had to jettison 10-20% of what was being said (since there's a basic principle that long subtitles shouldn't be on screen for less than two seconds).

But to complicate things further, Meyer has a very tricksy editing style that often means that we're looking at someone other than the one who's speaking at the start of that chunk of dialogue - so I had to make room for an identifying name in parenthesis, thus forcing me to made additional cuts to the full transcript. And overlapping dialogue poses yet another challenge.

But I do try to do this as conscientiously as possible - in fact, often when revising supplied SDH subtitles I'll add additional description. For instance, in Brute Force where Hume Cronyn's evil deputy prison warder is listening to music in his office, I changed "(Music playing)" to "(Wagner playing)", as that seemed psychologically significant. Although my favourite such change was in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, where "(Music playing)" became "(Slow tuba version of 'Deutschland über Alles' playing")

Reading that made me appreciate just how much work you put in. If I may ask what do you do if you can't understand what the character is saying? And would you add for instance mumbling to the subs instead of or as well as the translated mumbled words?

I imagine at some point you'd have to revert to the original script.