Re: WebVTT bidi: should a cue be allowed to contain more than one paragraph?

On Dec 7, 2011, at 14:38 , Glenn Maynard wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 8:20 AM, Aharon (Vladimir) Lanin <aharon@google.com> wrote:
> 3. I believe that there are use cases that require allowing a cue to contain more than one (bidi) paragraph. For example, there at least used to be a widespread practice in Israel for Hebrew-language films to come with subtitles that gave the dialogue in both the original Hebrew and in English translation, simultaneously on separate lines.
> 
> It sounds like you're describing very old legacy practice, possibly originating from media without dynamic captioning, like VHS.  When you can switch the language at runtime, which everything since DVD has been able to do, it's hard to think of a reason to do this.
> 

There are valid uses of mixed-language captioning, not least when the content being captioned is mixed-language.

I would have thought that the existence of international content, which has (audio) mixed language, was a non-zero case.  Educational material that's teaching a language may well embed that language in the student's native language, as well, and so on.

It's also possible that VTT will be used where the text has both the original language and a latin-alphabet transcription, in two different writing directions.

'xxxxxx (Oorance), he called'  where xxxxxx is in arabic; [Oorance was the name given by the locals to Lawrence of Arabia, as I recall]


David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.