I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. I was quoting myself. The link was an example of the type of rules I was referring to. It'd be idiotic to try and come up with hard rules that apply to every language in the world and I would never attempt to do so.For example, it says to use “I’d” instead of “I should” – something that makes no sense in any language except English. Or its use of quotes follows English rules. In Slovak we don’t write “Ahoj” but „Ahoj“ so why should we use a different system for our subtitles? And we never use single quotes."For example"
Also, its talk about 180 words per minute may be true for English, where most words are short, one or two syllables. But most European languages use much longer words, or rather a combination of some short and many long words. So the speed of reading cannot be the same, in words per minute, as in English.
It is also often impossible to make both lines of equal length precisely because of a long word in the middle of the sentence.
We also have strict rules about placing a comma (while English is fairly free about using them). We would be breaking the rules of our orthography if we skipped a comma at the end of a subtitle and replaced it with three dots.
And we really hate it when someone who knows nothing about our rules wants to impose foreign rules on our language. As I’m sure English speakers would be annoyed if a Slovak insisted they use Slovak rules (or the rules of any other foreign language).
There's no need, I feel, to have a single set of rules that applies to all languages but to have rules that apply to each in the same way. Some languages can't work with just 35 characters per line, others can be made faste. The point is that rules for subtitling shouldn't be subjective (or, rather, shouldn't be completely subjective). They should (and in reality they are) be clear and specific.
I have worked as a professional subtitles for spanish, portuguese and english. In all cases the rules are strict and enforced, but they're not identical. They do resemble each other because the underlying theory is the same for all. Rules for english can specify whether contractions are valid because in english contractions carry a clear contextual message. For spanish on the other hand there's no equivalent so it's not even mentioned, but BOTH have rules for length per line, lines per page, reading speed and minimum delays, etc. Then each language has its own rules that apply only to it.
There's no point arguing whether uppercase should be accented in cyrillic just because it's a hard rule in spanish. It's irrelevant in any discussion as would be pretending to apply english rules to non-english languages.
Nobody pretends to "impose foreign rules", but to give an example on why the rules linked before are all good and well, but too subjective and generic to be enforceable. Clearer rules need to be defined if there's any hope of anyone following them properly.