I saw this last night on the Fox TV program “Hell’s Kitchen”.
Problem:
The subtitle editor split the word “tomorrow” in the wrong place when making it span two lines.
Explanation:
The TV program “Hell’s Kitchen” sometimes must display subtitles because the audio was poorly recorded or because the producers believe that an American audience will not understand chef Gordon Ramsay or one of the contestants in the program.
I do not recall the entire subtitle, but at one point during last night’s episode someone said a sentence that contained the word “tomorrow”.
If a sentence does not fit on one line in a subtitle, the subtitle editor must make the sentence run across two or more subtitle lines.
I put the vertical bar (|) in the title of this blog post to indicate that this is where the subtitle editor chose to split the word “tomorrow” such that the first part ended one line and the second part started the next line.
Because subtitles are added in post-production and are not the equivalent of closed captioning of a live event, the subtitle editor should have had time to compose each subtitle correctly.
So it seems to me that the editor did not know how to split the word “tomorrow” into two lines.
- The editor split the word at the wrong letter.
- The editor failed to include a hyphen at the end of the first part of the split word.
A dictionary tells the reader where to split any word, and a hyphen is always required at the end of the first part of the split word.
Solution:
“… to- | morrow …”