On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 09:57:10 +0100, Glenn Maynard <[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 3:10 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <[email protected]>
wrote:
Multi-languaged subtitles/captions seem to be extremely uncommon,
unsurprisingly, since you have to understand all the languages to be
able to
read them.
They're very common in anime fansubs:
http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/2681/screenshotgg.jpg
The text on the left is a transcription, the top is a transliteration,
and the bottom is a translation.
I'm not personally a fan of doing this, but my own opinion aside, it's
definitely common. (I found the above example in the first episode I
picked off of my drive at random; I didn't even have to hunt for an
example.)
I'm pretty sure I've also seen cases of translation notes mixing
languages within the same caption, eg. "jinja (神社): shrine", but it's
less common and I don't have an example handy.
Wouldn't a more sane approach here be to have each language in its own
file, each marked up with its own language, so that they can be
enabled/disabled individually? I'd certainly appreciate not having the
screen cluttered with languages I don't understand...
More generally, I kind of doubt any solution we come up with will be good
enough for the most hardcore fansubbers, as they obviously think they need
pixel-perfect control of everything -- an anti-goal when separating
semantics from presentation, as WebVTT tries to do. So either they have to
use pre-rendered captions (boo!), or use a crazy format that is especially
tailored to anime fansubbing (it already exists).
(Also, we're not going to see <video><track> used for anime fansubbing on
the public Web until copyright terms are shortened to below the attention
span of anime fans.)
The case you mention isn't a problem, you just specify Japanese as the
main
language. There are a few other theoretical cases:
Then you're indicating that English text is Japanese, which I'd expect
to cause UAs to render everything with a Japanese font. That's what
happens when I load English text in Firefox and force SJIS: everything
is rendered in MS PGothic. That's probably just what Japanese users
want for English text mixed in with Japanese text, too--but it's
generally not what English users want with the reverse.
Yeah, the monospace Latin glyphs in most CJK look pretty bad. Still, if
one wants really fine-grained font control, it should already be possible
using webfonts and targeting specific glyphs with <c.foo>, etc.
--
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software
