Some history on our suggested “two line” limit and the issue of 42 characters maximum on a line.
I have been concerned with the issue of the ideal time and the ideal number of characters for subtitles for a long long time. In the past I looked often at BBC guidelines https://bbc.github.io/subtitle-guidelines/#Timing
The European Association for Screen Translation Subtitling Standards -- A Proposal
as well as the more recent ■■■■■■■ guidelines. (■■■■■■■ guidelines used to say OST MUST be translated but I don’t see that happening regularly. )
The 42 characters standard is not new – it’s been espoused a lot and as I recall there was some talk that it was originally based on the reading speed of a third grader. So there have been some recent calls to increase the number of characters to match the reading speed of the average adult. I think the character limit also has something to do with avoiding having to move the eyes across the movie theater screen as opposed to the much smaller screens we all deal with now. Crunchyroll and ■■■■■■■■■■ required their subbers to stay within either a 42 character or 45 character limit (I can’t remember precisely).
Two lines. I think all of these guidelines all say a maximum of two lines. If you think about a movie theater screen, the standard was chosen so the audience would’nt have to move their eyes much up and down the screen.
At viki. When viki could first be watched on the 3g iphone (I was the first beta tester) we were concerned that if subbers used breaks and the software also wrapped the text for the small phone screen, there would be five lines of text covering half the screen. To minimize this happening, we eliminated using breaks within the same person’s dialogue in a segment and limited subtitles to two lines. (Today we have larger phone screens but the roku platform is used by a huge percentage of viewers and it doesn’t handle breaks well)
I particularly like the conclusion of this BBC Research & Development Study How fast should subtitles be? “This study has shown that as long as the subtitles are of good quality and match the speech, rate isn’t an issue.”
For both Ninja Academy and Seg 101 we have looked at an ideal segment length of around 4 seconds. Why? Because over time we found that if the person is actually talking for the entire four seconds in Chinese or Korean the subtitle will fit in two lines.
If you read the various organization’s guidelines you will also see that they say to avoid having the subtitle still on the screen when the speech has stopped but we teach the segmenters, if the video allows, to add another second or 1.2 seconds. Why? To give the viewer more time to read viki subs which often are longer than the subtitle for the same dialogue on another streaming site. Are viki subbers verbose? No, they are subbing completely while other sites are trying to stick to the 42 character limit they drop background information, modifying clauses, the full name of an organization or character etc.
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