On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 04:21:17 +0100, Glenn Maynard <[email protected]> wrote:
2011/1/14 Silvia Pfeiffer <[email protected]>
Required attributes in WebVTT files should be the main language in use
and the kind of data found in the WebVTT file - information that is
It should be possible to specify language per-cue, or better, per block
of
text mid-cue. Subtitles making use of multiple languages are common,
and it
should be possible to apply proper font selection and word wrapping to
all
languages in use, not just the primary language.
When both English subtitles and Japanese captions are on screen, it
would be
very bad to choose a Chinese font for the Japanese text, and worse to
choose
a Western font and use it for everything, even if English is the
predominant
language in the file.
Multi-languaged subtitles/captions seem to be extremely uncommon,
unsurprisingly, since you have to understand all the languages to be able
to read them.
The case you mention isn't a problem, you just specify Japanese as the
main language. There are a few other theoretical cases:
* Multi-language CJK captions. I've never seen this, but outside of
captioning, it seems like the foreign script is usually transcribed to the
native script (e.g. writing Japanese names with simplified Chinese
characters).
* Use of Japanese or Chinese words in a mostly non-CJK subtitles. This
would make correct glyph selection impossible, but I've never seen it.
* Voice synthesis of e.g. mixed English/French captions. Given that this
would only be useful to be people who know both languages, it seem not
worth complicating the format for.
Do you have any examples of real-world subtitles/captions that would
benefit from more fine-grained language information?
--
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software
