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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