Questions about line breaks in subtitles Thread poster: Alessandra Cavaiani
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Hello, I have a couple of questions about line breaks in subtitles.
1- The Netflix guidelines state that you should not separate a preposition from its verb, does this mean that words such as “talk about”, “laugh at”, etc. should not be separated since they are considered prepositional verbs?
For example: “I'm able to be here today and talk about my struggles because of that.” I would usually break the line before “and” or “because” but there would b... See more Hello, I have a couple of questions about line breaks in subtitles.
1- The Netflix guidelines state that you should not separate a preposition from its verb, does this mean that words such as “talk about”, “laugh at”, etc. should not be separated since they are considered prepositional verbs?
For example: “I'm able to be here today and talk about my struggles because of that.” I would usually break the line before “and” or “because” but there would be too many characters so should I break it before or after “about”?
2- Can you break a line after “is”, “was”, “are”? For example: “Feeling safe in that moment was\ an important asset.” Or should it be broken before?
3- Can you separate “a little bit of”, “One of”, etc. from its noun? For example: “I think we're better off with a little bit\ of empathy, kindness and understanding.” There would be too many characters if I broke it off before “with” or before “kindness”, so where should I break the line?
Thank you very much for the help. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Mr. Satan (X)
English to Indonesian
| Re: Questions about line breaks in subtitles | May 7, 2022 |
Your profile states that you're translating into English. And for that, I would assume this is relating to the English style guidelines. I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm not the most qualified person around to provide a meaningful answer. But just to get the ball rolling...
1. Yes, those are prepositional... See more Your profile states that you're translating into English. And for that, I would assume this is relating to the English style guidelines. I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm not the most qualified person around to provide a meaningful answer. But just to get the ball rolling...
1. Yes, those are prepositional verbs. The English style guidelines clearly dictate that the line break should not separate a prepositional verb from its preposition.
2. Those are auxiliary verbs, and as with the above case, you are not allowed to separate them from the main verbs. Yes, I'm aware that your example uses a noun instead of a verb. So you probably can separate an auxiliary verb from the noun, much in the same way as you'd do with normal verbs. I personally don't like doing this sort of thing, and much prefer to condense and rephrase the sentence altogether, so I can avoid having to split them up.
3. I find this one a little bit tricky (wink, wink). Some people consider this phrase to be an adverb, some others consider it as a determiner, and the rest consider it as an idiom. To make it even worse, the English style guidelines never made a mention of how the translators should treat such words/phrases. You can always ask the PM about the best way to handle this.
That's all I could do. I'd suggest you to also post this question to this thread, so you can get a more satisfying and conclusive answer.
HTH
[Edited at 2022-05-07 14:15 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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