Capital letters should be used in subtitling in exactly the same way as they are used in standard writing, i.e. at the beginning of proper names, and to start a new sentence after a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark.
In the past, capital letters were used to render shouting. Nowadays, their use is more limited, and their sporadic presence confers them more expres-siveness. Subtitles should never dominate the screen and, therefore, the use of capitalized subtitles should be avoided. Not only do capital letters occupy more space that small letters, they are also more dif cult to read. If used, they are always full caps and never small caps. These subtitles do not normally have a full stop at the end of the line. The following instances may call for the use of upper case:
The title of the lm or programme:
SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS
Road signs, graf ti, newspaper headlines, banners, writing on clothes, messages on computer monitors, and inserts that are relatively short and written in upper case themselves. The following example is part of the decoration on a celebration cake:
20 YEARS OF HAPPINESS
When it is felt that the situation needs extra emphasis, such as a big banner in a political march or street demonstration:
ALEJO CRUZ FOR DEPUTY
FAMILIES OF THOSE MISSING FOR POLITICAL REASONS
On some occasions, capital and small letters share the subtitle to re ect the different font sizes visible on screen:
TO THEIR LEGITIMATE FAMILIES The grandmothers of the Plaza
5.2.12 Quotation marks or inverted commas (... ), (“…”),
(‘…’)
When emphasis is needed to foreground certain words or expressions, sub-titling is relatively limited in the number of typographical effects that it can accommodate. Although they are technologically possible and easy to produce, effects like bold, underline, or change of colours are virtually never used in traditional, interlingual subtitling. The only two main devices that subtitlers can exploit are quotation marks and italics (§5.3.1).
The use of quotation marks is a rather murky area since they are not de-ployed in a very systematic way in subtitling and their value can sometimes overlap that of italics, depending on the companies. The mere fact that quota-tion marks take up more space than italics on occasion inclines the balance in favour of italics, even though this might go against standard practice. All in all, however, quotation marks are more frequent in subtitling than italics, one of the reasons being that italics do not show up sharply on screen and pass unnoticed for some viewers.
Quotation marks are often called inverted commas, or quotes for short.
They differ in shape depending on the language, but some, like the Spanish or French ones («…»), are not possible in most subtitling programmes, and English quotes tend to be used instead. Two kinds of quotation marks can be distinguished in English: single (‘…’) and double (…), (“…”). Double quota-tion marks are the most frequently used in subtitling and, although both types can be found in subtitles, the straight ones seem to be the most common.
Quotation marks are mainly used to indicate direct speech. They also enclose the exact words of a quotation from a particular source, such as a book, a lm, or a newspaper. They are used when a person is reading a text out loud, or quoting literally what somebody else has said:
3 He should tell her:
“Get out, you fat cow!”
3 You have to say to yourself, calmly:
“Albin, you broke it”.
When the characters of a movie play the role of actors within the lm – i.e.
they stage a play – the use of the quotation marks is debatable. In these cases, it is obvious that the actors are ‘quoting’ from a play that they have learnt by heart, but if the play is long there is a risk of burdening the subtitles with far too many quotes. Discretion must be shown in these instances.
If a citation has to continue over several subtitles, different approaches are possible. Following the general convention applied in normal written texts, the inverted commas are used only at the beginning and the end of the quote. However, given that the viewer can only see one subtitle at a time, some companies prefer to use opening and closing quotation marks in every subtitle, arguing that the viewer needs to be reminded that a quote continues:
2 “Sergeant Chirino, terri ed, hides behind the well.
_______________
Moreira escapes over the fence.
He res his pistol at the sergeant _______________
who is badly hurt in the left arm.”
2 “Sergeant Chirino, terri ed, hides behind the well.”
_______________
“Moreira escapes over the fence.
He res his pistol at the sergeant”
_______________
“who is badly hurt in the left arm.”
An intermediate solution, recommended here, consists of opening the quotation marks at the beginning of each subtitle to remind the viewer of the citation, and closing them only in the last subtitle of the series:
3 “Sergeant Chirino, terri ed,
hides behind the well.
_______________
“Moreira escapes over the fence.
He res his pistol at the sergeant _______________
“who is badly hurt in the left arm.”
There is, however, one exception to this rule. When the entire quote spans two subtitles only, it is recommended, for aesthetic reasons, that the inverted commas be used at the beginning and the end of the quote, as in the example below:
2 “Hotel needs holiday reps.
_______________
“Smart appearance, imagination and language skills required.”
3 “Hotel needs holiday reps.
_______________
Smart appearance, imagination and language skills required.”
When the citation encompasses the whole subtitle(s), and a full stop or triple dots are used at the end of the last subtitle, because of a pause or hesitation, the punctuation marks are considered to be part of the actual quote and should be inserted before closing the quotation marks, as in the following example:
3 “But there’s no harm done.
It’s not the end of the world.”
However, when the quotation only runs for part of the subtitle, the full stop should go outside the inverted commas:
3 And then he said: “It was her fault”.
Note, though, that exclamation and question marks at the end of a subtitle behave differently:
3 And then he shouted: “Leave me alone!”
A quotation can be separated from the speaker by a colon, as in the previous examples, or by a comma when the order is reversed, although this structure is discouraged:
3 “It was her fault”, he said.
Quotation marks within quotations should be avoided if at all possible, since they are hard to distinguish on the screen. Where necessary, single inverted commas should be used:
3 “The last words uttered by Berthier were: ‘Don’t forget my little gift’.”
Quotation marks can also be used to ful l several other functions, which can be covered by italics as well, but quotes seem to be favoured on the whole by
companies. For example, inverted commas indicate that a word or expression is being used with a metalinguistic value, i.e. to speak about language itself:
3 Then an adverbial, “sedjem-en-ef”.
Quotation marks are used to denote that we are dealing with words or expres-sions that have been made up by the actors, are grammatically or phonetically incorrect, are in the process of being coined, or belong to a very marginal register. With colloquialisms, subtitlers have to decide how likely they are to be accepted and understood by the target audience. If the term is relatively frequent in daily speech, then the inverted commas may not be necessary:
3 He says “Geiby” instead of Gaby.
3 Mlle Corre, in the leader’s speech replace the word “scum” with “lout”.
Quotation marks are sometimes used with names of restaurants, cinemas, hotels, wines and other brand names that are left in the original language in the subtitles – even though they may not be widely known by the viewers – because the context elucidates their nature. This translation strategy con-tributes to creating a foreign atmosphere, reinforcing the feeling of otherness in the target text. It is dif cult to give a set of straightforward rules on how to act in these cases but subtitlers are advised to weigh up the context and to resort to inverted commas when attempting to add special emphasis, to refer to something that can actually be seen on screen, or to dispel any possible confusion or misunderstanding:
3 Are you taking her to “Vincent’s”?
3 I always liked my “Bentley”.
However, inverted commas are not normally used with proper names, names of cities or other places, celebrations and events that are suf ciently well known by the target public, or clear in the programme, and do not pose any comprehension problem:
3 A visit to the Sagrada Familia
should do the trick.
3 Where are you going?
- To confess.
_______________
There are confessors in Albacete!
Lexical items that refer to concepts or ideas that are somehow special and should not be taken at face value also call for quotes. Words and expressions under this category tend to be pronounced with special intonation or prosodic emphasis:
3 You can disguise it all you want
under your “Patrick’s good advice”.
3 This kind of “right”
is gonna put us in the toilet.
3 By saying your “son”
you mean Enrique, don’t you?
Quotation marks are also used to stress the value of nicknames, to underline plays on words, or to signal that a word or expression is being used ironically:
3 At least I don’t call him “fruitcake”
like the other kids.
3 You do the whole
“hip, dope-smoking homo” act _______________
and now it’s my fault?
The diegetic value of short dialogue exchanges, conversations, and whole interventions in a different language has to be weighed up before proceed-ing to translate (§3.3.2). When somebody speaks a second language – say Spanish or French – in an English spoken lm, these interventions are not normally subtitled when translating for the Hispanic and Francophone markets, since they coincide with the language spoken by the target audi-ence and can therefore be understood directly from the original soundtrack.
However, when these exchanges or words are in a third language, other than the main one spoken in the lm and the one spoken by the viewers – e.g. the
same lm for a Croatian audience – a decision has to be made. The general rule of thumb is to follow the same strategy that has been implemented in the original thus respecting the director’s wishes. If the nal decision is to translate the dialogue, some professionals recommend enclosing them within inverted commas (Ivarsson and Carroll, 1998:114-115), but current practice seems to favour the use of italics.