RE: Internationalizing timed video annotations

Hi Tay,

 

As far as I know, if you cannot resize the text box, then the solutions would goes along the lines of: a) providing some scrolling mechanism if it’s possible), and b) allow for some text expansion when creating the original box. Obviously neither solution may be available in your use case.

The c) option would be to abbreviate to make the text fit, but that is not often a good idea, and in your case that wouldn’t be possible if the text is translated automatically.

 

Allowing for expansion is a fairly well-known internationalization good practice. Maybe that is something you want to emphasis in your documentation.

 

Cheers,

-ys

 

BTW: I’m guessing you already knows this, but just in case: the Google Translate API v1 will be discontinued on Dec-1st, so you’ll have to use the v2 (paid service) API instead, or another API like the one for Microsoft Translator.

 

 

From: public-i18n-its-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-i18n-its-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of EmbedPlus
Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 4:01 PM
To: public-i18n-its-ig@w3.org
Subject: Internationalizing timed video annotations

 

Hello,

I thought I'd post here in hopes of getting some direction for an issue I'm having with internationalizing a third-party annotations feature I've developed on top of YouTube's standard player.  The feature allows anyone that embeds a YouTube video to add timed annotations regardless of who created the video.  Take a look here: http://www.embedplus.com/ for a demonstration. You'll see that the tool provides a wrapper that adds a few advanced playback features that the standard embedded player does not currently offer, like the ability jump around chapters, slow motion, instant replay and other things on an embedded video.  
 
Non-US users are beginning to discover the tool, likely through a video-based pronunciation API for English that we're building to demonstrate the enhanced playback options:  http://www.embedplus.com/dictionary/how-to-pronounce-words-and-use-them.aspx .  Perhaps some people here might be interested in this aside.  The idea is that a user searches for how to pronounce a word and the site not only offers audio but also videos of people actually using it in context.  You can checkout these common examples: "How do you pronounce and use gyro (in video)" - http://www.embedplus.com/dictionary/how-to-pronounce-gyro-and-use-it ; "How do you pronounce and use salmon (in video)" - http://www.embedplus.com/dictionary/how-to-pronounce-salmon-and-use-it
 
Just as YouTube videos have built-in automatic caption translations, we'd like to use the Google Language API to provide the same for the typically English text for our annotation feature.  However, an issue is raised that is analogous to the issue of translated HTML button text and other similar confined elements.  That is, the resulting text can consume much more space than allotted.  For important reasons (e.g. to avoid issues from overlaying copyrighted content), our annotations 'box' has a fixed size and location.  This seems to eliminate the applicability of well documented options like text wrapping and elastic positioning/sizing.  
 
Clearly there's the option of distributing extra characters over multiple annotation 'boxes' if translations exceed the fixed space.  The problem, however, is that many annotations are timed to show up at a specific frame and create some effect; hence distributing the text in boxes stretches the text over time which could prevent users from seeing the next effect.  
 
Temporarily pausing a video to "finish" the associated translation for a given frame is pretty much the only option I can think of, but it has a bit of an annoying factor to it.  I then thought to share this issue as it might generate some ideas in this group.  Perhaps it is too obscure or maybe there's a more relevant analog to the issue that I could use to find alternate solutions.
 
Any feedback is welcome.
 
-Tay