[whatwg] Google Feedback on the HTML5 media a11y specifications

[Glenn Maynard]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 3:10 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj at opera.com> 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.

> 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.

-- 
Glenn Maynard