Following up on my post here (https://cohost.org/frenemymine/post/5218617-subtitle-talk-in), I wanted to give you a little taste of the foulest, most depraved subtitle style guide ever invented, courtesy of the BBC.
Your eyes do not deceive you. Using the colors white, yellow, cyan and green in that order of priority, each new speaker must have their own font color for EVERY! LINE! OF! DIALOGUE! Whenever a character talks, you MUST remember what color they are. No speaker IDs allowed! When you make a mistake, and you will, you will have to go back through the title finding every new speaker that appeared and changing the color of each of their lines. Keep in mind that you will have no speaker IDs to search for and multiple characters can have the same color, and just think about how much you’ll suffer and how badly you’ll fall behind schedule.
I will never understand the reasoning behind this disgusting behavior. There is NO WAY this is clearer for the viewers. You really think it’s easier to have the viewer constantly be thinking “Okay, this episode Walter White is green… and Gustavo Fring is cyan… oh, Skyler is also green this episode so there are two green characters, can’t mix them up…” instead of just saying [Walter] when you don’t see him on screen? The subtitles look like rainbow-colored puke. I hate you, BBC! I hate you!
P.S. I once worked on French subtitles and they also wanted colors but just to distinguish between character dialogue, song lyrics, voiceover, etc. which is still dumb as hell but at least not horrible to create. Nonetheless, we should stop letting Europeans watch television until we can sort this out.