NOTES ON SUBTITLES AND SUPERIMPOSITIONS

Peter Thompson

(rev. 1/18/00)







SUBTITLES 



IN GENERAL:

The goal of subtitles is for them to be ÒinvisibleÓ as text because they are felt to 

be speech.  This goal is difficult to achieve because subtitles are texts read by 

the viewer while disengaged from the visuals and audio of a film.  Given this 

pull-away from the bodily presence of the film, the makers of subtitlesÑthese 

texts-for-audience performanceÑare faced with continual and difficult choices 

along the spectrum between translation exactitude and translation impression. 



This most basic positioning decision depends to some degree upon the length 

of the film: 

¥	Short films can employ exactitude without risking audience fatigue.

¥	Long films, with their correspondingly larger number of written texts, risk 

audience fatigue and audience withdrawal and even active resentment. 

Impression, in general, will diminish the number of words a viewer must 

read. The makers of a long film requiring subtitles must advocate for the 

audience by placing the film appropriately along the spectrum between 

exactitude and impression. 





SPATIAL PLACEMENT:

Subtitles are an intrusion into the visual space of a film.  The tendency, 

therefore, is to place them at the bottom border of TV-safe to keep the filmic 

space clear.  The elements that determine if this placement is correct also 

have to do with how many subtitles the audience will read, and over what length 

of time, and how fast the subtitles replace each other.  Given a long, subtitle-

heavy film, it is often best to aid the audience by placing subtitles higher upon 

the screen in order to diminish the eye-jump distance from TV-safe to center-

frame.  This distance, over the course of a long film, risks fatiguing the 

audience to the extent that they stop reading the subtitles altogether, or, 

conversely, see little of the film except the texts.



TIME PLACEMENT:

The ideal is to place a subtitle at the moment that a person begins to speak, 

and to pull it from the screen at the moment they cease speaking.  

Complications such as short utterances, fast utterances, multiple utterances, 

gestures and sound within the environment often make this ideal impractical.  



In solving these placement and exit problems, the filmmaker is often aided by 

cinematic perceptual synaesthesia. Example: if the last moment of utterance is 

too soon to exit a subtitle because the viewer needs more time to actually read 

the text, look for a gesture that often accompanies the cessation of an utterance 

and then time the subtitle to exit at the end of that gesture because the gesture 

will often be felt as both a continuation of and a substitution for the voice if not 

too much time has elapsed between the cessation of the voice and gesture.  



Time Placement Observations (in no particular order):

¥	Align subtitle to gesture, whenever possible.

¥	Align the exit of a subtitle with the end of the voice utterance.  If reading 

comprehension will suffer because of this coordination, then attempt to 

coordinate the exit by means of a gesture from the person who had just 

spoken. When words are aligned to gesture, time the exit of the subtitle 

to the dramatic closure of the gesture.  Remember that the exit must 

then be coordinated rhythmically with any incoming subtitle.

¥	Sometimes subtitle duration can be linked to gazeÑwhen the head 

turns or the eye blinks is often a good place to end the subtitle duration.

¥	When separating two subtitles by a dissolve, cut the exiting subtitle 

before the dissolve, otherwise the viewer will be reading the text which is 

stable and will likely miss the dissolve which is visually unstable and 

ephemeral but absolutely critical to understanding its usage as film 

grammar (usually, the passage of time).  By the same amount of time 

that the exiting subtitle is cut before the dissolve, add that amount of time 

to the entering subtitle for rhythm match.  This kind of situation also begs 

for a stylistic indicator such as a dash at the tail of the exiting subtitle and 

a balancing dash at the head of the entering subtitle.

¥	When one character asks another to repeat what they have just said, and 

that is something that has already been said and subtitled, it is often 

effective to subtitle the second utterance, too, because it will give more 

time for the first to be digested and there is often a more complete 

dramatic gesture that accompanies the second utterance.

¥	It is often best if there is blank space between utterances by two or more 

people in order to avoid confusion.  If, however, you are highlighting the 

utterance of one character by means of a subtitle color that is stylistically 

known to ÒbelongÓ to that person, then the lines can but up against each 

other with little or no confusion.

¥	If a subtitle comes at the end of a shot, it is often wiser to keep that 

subtitle on the screen and extended to the very end of that shot and then 

cut both subtitle and shot by the change to the second shot rather than 

risk a competing subtitle exit rhythm being placed so close to the end of 

the shot.

¥	If a word in a foreign language is either known or close to the word in the 

language of the subtitles, that word must be placed in a word-order 

where it can synch with the spoken utterance.  For example, if the 

Spanish word ÒchiaroÓ is spoken at the end of a sentence, then the 

English word ÒclearÓ should be the last word of that sentence.  

¥	It is better if the title or subtitle is terminated before panning or cutting.  

Said differently, use the commencement of a pan as the signal for the 

termination of a subtitle.

¥	When there are recognizable words or names in the foreign language, 

place them visually in the sentence closest to the time that the viewer 

while reading will hear that word or name.  

¥	The smaller the amount of punctuation, the better.  The audience often 

feels the trajectory of a sentence and does not have to be aided by a lot 

of punctuation.  Take the use of periods, for example.  Periods tend to fall 

at the lower right corner of the frame;  accordingly, they are extremely 

active visually.  Because of the structure of the English language, we 

understand where a sentence is goingÑotherwise we would not be able 

to interrupt each other.  An audience similarly understands when a 

sentence has finished without the use of conclusing punctuation.  Their 

use is often not worth the visual intrusion into the diagetic film-space.





SUBTITLING RITUALS:

¥	In general, it is most effective to align the duration of the subtitle to the 

duration of the breath of ritual utterance. If the utterance is long with more 

than one phrase, extend the duration of the subtitles so there is no visual 

blank space between them.  Assign blank space to the inhale.

¥	If the pace of ritual utterance is fast, you might decide that a double or 

triple line subtitle template is best in order to signal, by means of that 

style, that ritual space has been entered and therefore to demarcate it 

from the rest of the film.  If this style usage is chosen, it must be 

extended to any other ritual situations throughout the film.



SUPERIMPOSITIONS:



¥	It is common practice to wait for one beat before laying a 

superimposition over a new scene.  The rightness of that 

superimposition placement is increased if it is in synch with a beginning 

of a spoken utterance or other noticeable sound from the filmÕs diagetic 

sound environment.

¥	For a superimposition to be added to a shot in which a subtitle is already 

on the screen, it is often rhythmically best if both elements exit the 

screen together.