Currently, my favourite thing to do in the world is subtitle stuff. Unfortunetly, I have really bad wrist issues that get in the way of just spending all my time doing it. I still do spend most of my time doing it anyway, I just wish I had more time and less chances of getting hit with a really bad wrist flare up.
This page here is where I share all my knowledge of making acessible and good subtitles that respect the art and the user.
I hope I can make you hate most of the bullshit surrounding standard captioning pratices and make you aware of how much bad subtiling there is in the world. Share my pain :D
The Basics
This is going to save you a lot of heartache.
If you can hear it, you have to be able to read it.
It doesn't matter if people are saying a bunch of filler worlds, slurs or curses, Write. It. Out.
You don't get to decide to people what they can and can't hear. Don't shorten or alterate stuff either. Write verbatim. Anything else and you're an absolute ableist piece of shit and I hope whoever set the idea of partial/innacurate transcripts as aceptable in the first place gets shot in the head.
Don't leave gaps
Ok, so there's room for nuance here, but in general, when segmenting your subs you want the transition from one to the other to be seamless, without leaving a empty space where there's no subs, otherwise it creates this flickering effect.
I have found that gaps of half a second or more are fine to leave as long as each of the two lines have a good enough duration.
Aim for subs to remain evenly concentrated at the center of the screen
Really long, rundown sentences spread across the screen take a lot of time and energy to read and process, meanwhile shorter, split sentences flow much better.
Again, there's room for nuance here. Multiple, really short (in terms of time) subs in quick sucession are hard to process too.
My tools
My Subtitles
Currently, my big subtitle project has been making subtitles for the entire nirvana the band the show (the) webseries.
I'm also working on subtitling Nathan Fielder's entire youtube channel. Curently on a bit of a break, but you can check all I've done so far, as well as the rest of my subtitling work on my Nekocap profile.
Before youtube decided to kill their community captions, I used to subtitle a few ramdom videos for channels I watched. I don't know what videos they are anymore, 'cuz they took that infromation aways when they killed the program. I subtitled a few videos for the AI: The Sommnium Files ARG-ish channel. I know I translated the music video, but I haven't revisited any of them.
As a rule of thumb, unless stated otherwise, all my subs are meant to be modified, translated and used for whatever you want. Credit not needed, but apreciated (And I would be happy to know if you use them to make something yourself).