Linguistic Team International Forum

Just a note to say that Jon was here and to thank everyone for all the input.

I have to agree that as an indoctrinated "big shot" Westerner, I am biased toward American-English rules. ie. Spelling, (color) parenthesis or commas rather than hyphens, double quotation marks for primary quotes and single quotation marks for quotes within a quote, and many other examples. I don't remember where I read it but I understand that we as a linguistic team leave out any commas at the end of a string but leave periods. I am guilty by naivete on that one and I apologize for any inconveniece that may have caused. I want to thank Di for pointing out hyphens in double adjectives as I was unsure about that. It can probably be translated more concisely into some other languages without using the hyphen.

Cheers team, you're making a difference

Ohhhhh, JonWhit
You're soooo funny! I totally understand what it's like to be American. Hey, since joining this team, I've had to re-learn 37 years of teaching English. hahaha! But hey, we can do it! It's nice to have you join our 'colourful' team, although it was always "colorful" to me. Well, I guess it's time we Americans grow-up and start thinking GLOBAL! Video proofing is entirely different from proofing student essays and research papers anyway!
Nice to have you here!
Di

Hello transcribers!
we had a very interesting conversation with a person who has a professional experience with subtitling. I'm reporting here something that might be of your interest, with a few examples I found among our projects.

He explained us that the transcription has to be as neutral as possible, avoiding to stress words by using quotes and capitals letters, or putting words into brakets if they are part of a speech. And we have to consider that subs are done not only for the translations but also for deaf people. Quotes, brakets and capital letters have their own function, other than highlighting words or saying which are less relevant:

"..." : quotes are used just for direct speeches (while in Common Objection they are used repeatedly to stress words);

ABC : capital letters are used just to rewrite "titles" appearing on the screen (there's a lot of them in Z:MF);

(...) : brakets should not be used to put speaker words into (while they are used twice in RT interview, VP to bring peace);

- : the hyphen to introduce a direct speech is used only when the speeches by two different speakers appear in the same string / shot. Otherwise it's not necessary, especially if the images help in understanding that the speaker changed. (the example is again the interview on RT, VP to bring peace) where hyphens were used at the beginning of each string introduced by a new speaker, but actually they'd be necessary just in a couple of occasions because the video already tell us who is speaking
I hope it's clear and of help. Following this points transcriptions will also be more uniform and consistent!

Thanks a lot for the work done so far,
Hugs

Diana,
I really like those suggestions. I have always thought that subtitles should be 'less busy', if you understand what I mean. Symbols and brackets and double quotes make the strings too distracting. These rules would be good to add to our guidelines. The hyphen rule can be easily overused too.

Thanks, Diana!
Great job!
((hugs))
Di

Really nice info, Diana
Any source that he can share so we adjust our guidelines accordingly?

Yes, Di! with "less busy" I see what you mean. We decided to clear some symbols, here and there in our translations, to avoid distractions. Where we felt it was important to get to whole idea rather than focusing on sigle words. But there aren't "rules", each team of transcribers decide for their own guidelines and there can be exceptions.

hey, Rod! I could think you have a problem with sources you're always one step forward, my friend! but you'll discuss on this together with the team before making adjustments! we share a lot of videos and they are of different kinds (maybe we just need to keep lectures and long speeches quite "clean" but you could still like to play with words on the very shorter ones... )

of course, Bruno! not only you've been doing a lot of progress, but you are doing very good I already told you more than once!!! and you know we'd be lost without transcriptions. It might sounds as exaggerated but it'd keep us ages to translate without a well-done and human made transcript, with fixed timestamp, the glossary... and all the resources we share. Thank you, to all!

Hugs and kisses

Hey, guys!

I've just proofread the Guidelines!

I think this rule could be a little clearer:
When introducing a quotation with words like "He said", "She whispered", "It stated", etc., no punctuation is needed.
How about: When introducing a quotation with words like "He said"...no punctuation is needed to separate "He said" from the direct quote that follows it.

In this example, there needs to be a period at the end:

Rather than speculate, which is what the great majority of public does (and I'm going to talk about it later as an argument that moves against us. People often bring this up.) let's actually think about what we actually know

Under capitalization rules:
Always capitalize President when it refers to the President of the US even when the title is not followed by a name. (example: The President met with members of Congress at the White House yesterday.)

Nicely done, Sweet Bru!
((hugs))
Di