TED Translators Cheat-sheet

From TED Translators Wiki
Revision as of 16:48, 4 March 2015 by Isiliel (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search

This "cheat sheet" represents best practices in OTP subtitling. Note that the character number values refer to languages which use a Latin script, and may differ for languages written in other scripts (often being lower than the max numbers below). For length and reading speed rules for your non-Latin script language, consult your language's page on OTPedia, your Language Coordinators or fellow OTP volunteers in your language's Facebook group. Below, you will find a few versions of the OTP Cheat-sheet that you can adapt for your language.

Wiki table

Open this article for editing, copy the code and paste it into a new article to create a version for your language. You can learn more about editing OTPedia in this guide and more about customizing such tables here (if you wish to add or merge fields, or align the sheet with text in a specific way).

OTP Cheat-sheet
Subtitle duration 1-7 seconds
Max reading speed 21 characters/s
Max number of lines 2
Max line length 42 characters
Max subtitle length 84 characters
Subtitle start Not over 100 ms before speech
Line-breaking Don't split linguistic units
Line-length balance One line can't be shorter
than 50% of the other
Subtitle structure Don't merge end and beginning
of two sentences
Text segmentation Don't split sentences too much
if not necessary for length/speed
Sound representation (Parentheses)
On-screen text [Square brackets]

Image formats

Instead of the Wiki table above, you can use the image format designed by Dimitra Papageorgiou. If you know how to use Adobe Photoshop or the free, multi-platform graphics-editing software GIMP, you can easily adapt this image format for your language (the text layers are editable in the PSD and XCF files).

Use these links to download the desired image format: PNG, PSD / Photoshop or XCF / GIMP. If you have prepared a version in your own language, share it with us at translate@ted.com, we would love to spread the news!

Image shows the OTP cheat sheet table with subtitle standards.

Non-English versions

Below, you will find non-English versions of the OTP Cheat-sheet, adapted by OTP volunteers.

Greek

The Greek version of the OTP Cheat-sheet was created by Dimitra Papageorgiou.

alt=Image shows the Greek version of the OTP cheat sheet table with subtitle standards.