It's an understandable complaint, yeah, and I do generally try to balance things across multiple lines after noticing that was ideal for me personally as a reader. The main issue that's hard to get around at times is that some of the original Japanese really is that dense with information and I have a difficult time paring some lines down without sacrificing a critical nuance that's necessary to the rhetorical integrity of what's being said, if that makes sense. Part of the problem could well be that I'm simply just not great at being my own editor and there are definitely always lines that I look at and worry about readability in terms of speed. But given the sheer economic difference in terms of how much space and phonetics often need to be devoted to convey a sentence in Japanese, which is routinely short, and English, which is comparatively lengthy, it's a delicate balancing act. It's a problem that's mostly unique to trailers and other sorts of videos; in most every other translated medium, the consumer can halt progress to some extent until they've fully comprehended something, but videos have to move on mercilessly. Making a hard problem even tougher is the reality that in most normal subtitling situations, it's considered good practice that a given vocal line shouldn't have a corresponding subtitle take up three lines of text. In most instances, if you've written a line that long, you definitely have an editing problem of some sort that also potentially compromises the visual integrity of the video file, even if in select situations it may partly rectify the issue you're talking about.
I'm guessing you're probably referring to the lines of dialog whose subtitles take up two lines edge to edge horizontally, yeah? In my experience, if a line runs that long, it's normally because the original Japanese necessitates a pretty hefty expansion in English since I definitely don't intentionally aim for them to take up that much real estate. I watch pretty much every video I subtitle ad nauseum as I'm working on them to test how well I myself can process such lines within the time frame provided, but of course, I'm just one person and the fact that I know what's coming can significantly bias things. It's a tricky issue to work around and I'm honestly surprised more people don't level that sort of criticism at me, as it's totally valid.
If you have specific lines in mind that you'd like my take on, I'd be happy to discuss them since frankly I don't get enough actually critical feedback on my work, ahaha. I almost always do all of the work on my translation projects by myself partly as a matter of pride, but also just so I have the most control over how the output looks aesthetically, but I probably really should go recruit an editor of some sort one of these days.
Thanks for bringing this up, though! I really need this sort of feedback and I'll definitely be more vigilant about it in future stuff I work on!
