Hi CatBus
I have been thinking on how to improve the flow in a subtitle. This is what I have come up with and I wondering what you are thinking about it.

1 Defining the characters:

LS=Luke skywalker
DV=Darth Vader
R2=R2D2
C3=C3P0
UO=Uncle Owen
Ux=Unkown
and so on, to be used instead of speechlines(–) and infront of their lines too. Defining the characters could be done just before their first appearance:

AU=Aunt Beru

AU Luke! Luke!

AU Luke, tell Uncle if he gets a translator,
be sure it speaks Bocce.

LS=Luke Skywalker

LS Doesn’t look like we have much
of a choice, but I’ll remind him.

2 Rolling subtitle:

UO Can you speak Bocce?
C3 Of course I can, sir. It’s like…

C3 Of course I can, sir. It’s like…
C3 …a second language to me. I’m as fluent—

C3 …a second language to me. I’m as fluent—
UO Yeah, all right. Shut up. I’ll take this one. Luke!

UO Yeah, all right. Shut up. I’ll take this one. Luke!
UO Take these two over to the garage, will you?

UO Take these two over to the garage, will you?
UO I want them cleaned up before dinner.

This would get people more time to read the lines.
Should it be declared somehow when the line moves up to give space for a new line? Maybe an arrow poinitng upwards?

Reading it like this doesn’t give it much justice, create a subtitle and see how the ideas works/doesn’t work.

3 subtitles for dubs:

The dubs doesn’t always correspond to the subtitle, maybe create subtitles for these too?

4 The bad idea:
I was thinking of maybe makin the second line backwards to make the reading flow a little smoother:

UO Take these two over to the garage, will you?
UO .dinner before up cleaned them want I

How could this idea work in other languages?