"Punctuation marks that facilitate a better understanding of sentences emotional signals should be retained." quoted from Angeline, from China; on a Subtiling forum, https://www.proz.com/forum/subtitling/126109-full_stops_periods_within_subtitles.html. Accessed on 20.02.2019

Ellipsis is a strategy for subtitling speech that extends over more than one shot. Three dots, or full-stops, let the viewer know that more information will be made available in the ensuing subtitle.

Current trends in subtitling do not recommend using ellipsis in the trailing sub (see https://github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit/issues/2104 accessed 13.02.2019)

The decision as to whether to capitalise the subtitle following the ellipsis also has to be taken. In the following example, taken from L'école buissonière [The School of Life] (2017, 0:15:05) the main character, Célestine, pauses after she explains to Paul (the young boy) how free the poacher 'Totoche' is. In order to illustrate her argument she explains Totoche's freedom to the boy by pointing to his ramshackle habitation: a dilapidated houseboat on the river.

The ellipsis in the leading subtitle (Fig.1) indicates that an explanation is imminent. The trailing subtitle (Fig.2) is capitalised at the start of the sentence, but, according to trend, does not include trailing elipsis.

Subtitling conventions and trends are consistently contradicted, challenged, experimented with, ignored, or re-arranged. Such is the nature of a developing medium, and one that is a forerunner of textual representation at these times.

In contrast to the example above is one of the subtitles for the 2007 film La Vie en Rose- the Oscar-winning film about the legendary French singer Edith Piaf. Ellipsis is used in the trailing subtitle from the sequence below (Fig. 3 - Fig. 4). We may assume that the trend for eliminating the trailing subtitle ellipsis was established somewhere between 2007 and 2017.

Commas have a different function to ellipsis in practice and represent the conventions of written text, since they allow the trailing subtitle to remain in lower-case; see Figs. 5-8

Filmography

Yves Calbérac (Director). (2015). The Student and Mister Henri (L'étudiante et Monsieur Henri). [Motion Picture] France: Mandarin Films, StudioCanal, France 2 Cinéma . Retrieved from https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01LBP8BIA?pf_rd_p=71cb17e9-f468-4d3f-94d5-a0de44c50a7e&pf_rd_r=9RE9A91MVPT2H72SZBW3 on 18.02.2019.

Olivier Dahan (Director). (2007). La Vie en Rose. [Motion Picture] France: Légende Films, TF1 International, TF1 Films Production. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vie-en-Rose-Marion-Cotillard/dp/B00FYO51X8/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1550437856&sr=1-1&keywords=la+vie+en+rose on 17.02.2019.

Nicolas Vannier (Director). (2017). The School of Life ( L'école buissonière). [Motion Picture] France: Radar Films. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B078767JMZ/ref=pd_cbs_318_3 on 13.02.2019.