Notes
Subtitles that work
A subtitle is a piece of film-making, not a transcript, and the good ones are written to be read at the speed of a glance.
The first habit is compression. A line that reproduces every word of the dialogue will not be finished before the cut, so the reader looks down instead of at the actor. Experienced subtitlers cut roughly a third of the words and keep the sense; the audience never notices what is missing because they are hearing the performance underneath.
The second is cutting on the cut. A subtitle that survives across an edit drags the previous shot into the next one and quietly damages the rhythm the editor built. Good tracks break where the picture breaks.
The third is restraint about names. Fan-made tracks tend to gloss — a parenthesis explaining a term, an on-screen note about a place. It is generous and it is fatal: the eye stops on the explanation and the scene continues without you.
None of this is expensive. It is a matter of somebody watching the film with the track on, at speed, and cutting whatever they had to read twice.