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Should A Sentence Break With 2 Dots Or With 3?


Spiny Norman
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Two dots..or three dots...?  

4 members have voted

  1. 1. Should an English sentence break with two dots or with three?

    • Two dots..
      0
    • Three dots...
      4
    • Dont care about gramar.
      0


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The basic rule in Dutch translations is only 3 dots when the speaker doesn't finish his sentence.

I never understand the need of dots to indicate the sentence is going to follow, let alone dots before a sentence to indicate that the sentence is moving on.

 

I do care about grammar, why can I not choose for no dots at all in the poll? Two dots looks to me as a typo.

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Spiny Norman

 

First of all, like BorisVictor says, there's no such thing as two dots in punctuation, unless you're talking about the colon.

 

While it may vary, ellipsis and em dash in subtitles generally follow those rules:

 

Ellipsis:  ...

 

Also called suspension dot, it marks a pause, an unfinished thought, a feeling of longing, etc. It is self-contained, the sentence ends there.

 

- So that's what it meant...

 

Em Dash:  

 

Generally replaced by the hyphen in common usage.

 

The use of this punctuation indicates that the sentence has been cut due to external reason (i.e. someone interrupts the conversation) 

 

- I want to take him to—— (often doubled)

- No!

 

It can also be used when it demarcates a break of thought or a slight hesitation by the speaker.

 

- This is not—what are you doing?

 

- I—I'd like that.

 

There are other rules, but those are the main.

In some usage, the ellipsis is replaced by the dash, depending on the style guides.

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Oh I have an opinion, but I wanted to leave the question completely open and wait for replies. (I asked after one arrogant subtitler rudely dismissed my comments that he should not do them the way he did.)

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The two dots seem to exist in British scripts though.

They often have them instead of the three dots for some reason, and at the beginning of a sentence, when the previous one was abruptly cut.

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The two dots seem to exist in British scripts though.

They often have them instead of the three dots for some reason, and at the beginning of a sentence, when the previous one was abruptly cut.

Funny, I JUST saw the same 15 minutes ago on a BBC subtitle (from a new company, Swan instead of Red Bee). But so far only start-sentence.

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Spiny Normal

 

It is indeed a British subtitling rule. (cannot express harder: subtitles ONLY and British ONLY)

 


 

Excerpt from the Independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries—Guidance on Standards for Subtitling (worth the read):

 

[...]

 

Example (ii) If such sentence breaking procedures are inappropriate, it might be necessary to allow a single long sentence to extend over more than one subtitle. In this case, sentences should be segmented at natural linguistic breaks such that each subtitle forms an integrated linguistic unit. Thus, segmentation at clause boundaries is to be preferred. For example:

 
When I jumped on the bus...
 
..I saw the man who had taken
the basket from the old lady.
 
Segmentation at major phrase boundaries can also be accepted as follows:
 
On two minor occasions
immediately following the war,...
 
..small numbers of people
were seen crossing the border.
 
There is considerable evidence from the psycho-linguistic literature that normal reading is organised into word groups corresponding to syntactic clauses and phrases, and that linguistically coherent segmentation of text can significantly improve readability.
 
Random segmentation such as
 
On two minor occasions
immediately following the war,...
 
..numbers of people, etc.
 
must certainly be avoided.
 
In the examples given above, sequences of dots (three at the end of a to-be-continued subtitle, and two at the beginning of a continuation) are used to mark the fact that a segmentation is taking place. Many viewers have found this technique helpful.
 
[...]
 

 
But as we all agree, sentence should never end with two dots.
 
If you're interested in subtitling, please read this
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Ah, you don't have to tell me that. It was some other guy who insisted on 2 dots. Even had a "says you" attitude about it too (while at the same time still claiming to listen to all feedback).

 

Thanks for that document, that is at least more or less official.

The ",..." is strange though. That must be a typo. I can't imagine you'd need a comma AND 3 dots.

 

They have a new document too: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/guidance/other-guidance/tv_access_serv/archive/subtitling_stnds/

Says more or less the same on the subject.

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