What purpose do the question marks in the subtitles to the Met Opera's HD performances serve?
Part of our current daily social-distancing routine, has been to watch the daily Met Opera's HD streamings
www.metopera.org
We enable the English subtitles. Many of them, however, contain puzzling question marks. One theory of ours is that they are used to distinguish different voices singing simultaneously.
Here's an example.
Here, the question marks--coming at the beginning of the lines--do certainly seem to denote different voices, but sometimes they awkwardly come in the middle of the text. And also,
which doesn't seem to make much sense.
I did note, however, in the recent showing of Elektra, there were no such question marks at all.
Are these question marks purposeful-as now appears to be the case, if not always artfully inserted--or some malfunction of one sort or another?
(1)1 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
Yes, this is some character encoding issue, often the result of a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash.
In the upper example, the translation presumably uses one of these to separate different speakers:
–The painter was there.
–Cavaradossi?
The bottom example seems to be an em-dash:
The facts—who accuses me?
Terms of Use Privacy policy Contact About Cancellation policy © freshhoot.com2025 All Rights reserved.