In this article the author explains that the mere description of translation behaviour may not provide useful results, whereas the study of norms is bound to give insight to the intersubjective sense of what is ‘proper’, ‘correct’, or ‘appropriate’. Since norms are not directly observable, a possible approach to them is through their textual or extra-textual manifestations. The focus in this contribution is on textual norms, that is, regularities in the choices made by subtitlers, as manifested in the subtitled versions in Spanish and Greek of the films The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996) and Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999). Given the paper’s qualitative and descriptive nature, rather than laws or absolute truths, possible explanations are proposed and more hypotheses are generated, which in turn become the basis for future research. Sokoli’s proposals can be used not only to explain and predict the way subtitles are done, but also to train future subtitlers.