Linguistic Team International Forum

Thank you Di, I agree with you, we have to be crystal clear with those definitions

I added the extra bit about compound adjectives, which I linked to a particular section of the wikipedia article about hyphens.

If you have other suggestions and ideas, please don't hesitate to let the group know about them. For example, we could imagine having a more concise version of the guidelines and use the wiki to categorize the information better... We don't have a whole lot of feedback so it's hard to conduct experiments, but it doesn't hurt to question what we have to make it better

P.S : that's weird, when I type wikipedia, my spellchecker highlights it as a spelling mistake and wants to put "pediatric" instead

1st point : hyphen rule related to dialog

I want your opinion on this hyphen rule in regards to dialog versus individual people talking independantly. Take the example of The Venus Project tours.

Would you rather have hyphens for each speaker there or no hyphens?

My guideline brain says it's not a dialog so no hyphens, but my translator brain says it would be easier for them to get the context, even though speaker identification is not meant for translators but for hard of hearing people.

Any thoughts?


Second point : About the 70 character rule.

We are not making subtitles for TVs but for computer monitors, which means that sometimes we have some extra room, i.e we can put more than 42 chars. per subtitle line.

So I find myself bending the 70 character rule from time to time, and when I do that I make sure that the subtitle doesn't spill over a third line in English. If it doesn't and that the lines before and after are not exceeding 70 characters, I allow myself this rule violation, because at times it leaves more time for translators.

My point is this: it's important for us to leave translators extra "character room" (physical space in which to put extra characters that some more verbose languages would require), but it's EQUALLY IMPORTANT for us to leave extra "temporal room" (make the duration of each string is as long as possible, within reason, to facilitate reading).

Thanks Di for sharing your conclusions about the Roxanne video you proofread. My own conclusions are that the same issues keep popping up, which would be summed up as follows: - Issues with punctuation, especially before quotes - Issues with double quotes versus single quotes - Issues with run-on sentences. I think we have to pay special attention to these points as we proofread and monitor the situation as we progress. If we still the same problems arising, we need to identify the team member or members who keep making those mistakes and do whatever we have to do for that or these members to stick with the rules that were agreed upon. (This sentence sounds a little military, sorry about that )