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Saturday, January 8th, 2022

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Punctuation for multi-line titles

What should be the punctuation separator for a multi-part title, where the parts are clearly separate, and are displayed on separate lines?

Does it depend on the country or language?

I've seen a dash (or hyphen), a colon, and a comma. Such punctuation isn't on display on-screen, but used on IMDb and elsewhere in print when you need to refer to the title in a single line of text. But what's the convention? Or is there one?

For example:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063665/

The new title for this is

The Rolling Stones

Sympathy for the Devil

Clearly there is a separation between two parts of this title. However, it was listed on IMDb as run together without punctuation. I changed it to add a hyphen separator. I chose the hyphen because the AKA for the Germany DVD used a hyphen:

211224-121000-550000

The Rolling Stones - Sympathy for the Devil

In the comment box I wrote:

"Added implied punctuation (used by convention to separate title parts on two separate lines in the movie credits). Using a hyphen as in the Germany DVD title also listed on this IMDb page."

It was Approved, but when the site updated I saw the hyphen was instead a colon:

The Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil

When I tried to change the colon into a hyphen,

211230-094013-481000

it was Declined for being "Badly Formatted".

Really? What IS the proper format? Should the Germany DVD listing also be changed to a colon? Or is a hyphen the proper convention for German titles in text, but not in English? Who says English should use a colon? What about other languages (like French)? I've seen a comma used in many cases. Are these interchangeable? Does it matter?

An interesting side-note is that in printing French, a space is always included before a colon (and before a question mark too), as if the colon acted like a dash (or hyphen).

And as a point of order, when using a dash in text anywhere, note this is not a hyphen. A hyphen is a different symbol shorter in length and used to divide a compound word in English or French (German just runs the words together), or to divide between syllables for end-of-line printing. A dash is a syntactical punctuation. However, IMDb automatically uses a hyphen symbol in place of a dash.

Is there any standardization in single line text punctuation in title part separation in the field, and does IMDb convention follow this or have its own?

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4 years ago

Subtitles are separated from the main title with a colon for English titles and a '-' for German titles IF the title on the 'film' uses no separator. Other languages are not (yet) standardized. If the title on the 'film' already uses a separator it is used.

https://help.imdb.com/article/contribution/titles/title-formatting/G56U5ERK7YY47CQB

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@mbmb​ The example isn't a sub-title. The whole thing is the main (full) title. It just has 2 parts, separated on 2 lines.

Or another way to look at it is the main title is "Sympathy for the Devil" (and it's been released just as that), and "The Rolling Stones" is a pre-title (added in some releases).

In any case, I see various punctuation used in print, from various sources. There doesn't seem to be any standarization. Still not sure what the convention is or should be.

(edited)

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That's the imdb convention with punctuation you were looking for.

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@mbmb

No, what you quoted only applies to sub-titles, that is a secondary title to the main title. Described in the help section you quoted as:

A subtitle can be identified by either appearing on a separate screen from the main title, or being in a significantly smaller font.

I'm inquiring about a main title that clearly has two parts to it, that are displayed on two separate consecutive lines in the same typeface and size on the same screen. IMDb help pages don't address this situation.

I don't find any conventions; everybody does it differently. I've seen separators being a colon, a dash, a hyphen, a comma, a slash, or even some cute symbol, or no separator at all (which last tends to make the title ungrammatical and confusing).

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The policy at https://help.imdb.com/article/contribution/titles/title-formatting/G56U5ERK7YY47CQB# regarding subtitles is the closest policy I can find in the IMDb help pages to what you are looking for. It may not be exactly what you were expecting, but for a title displayed as

The Rolling Stones

Sympathy for the Devil

I would list it as The Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil with a colon.