- From: <Johnb@screen.subtitling.com>
- Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 17:23:45 -0000
- To: asgilman@iamdigex.net, public-tt@w3.org
Al Gilman wrote: One is coverage: does the text track cover what is said in the sound track, or does it cover more by way of sounds or action. [And terms/language to describe the answer to "if more, then what?"] But aside from texture, there is the granularity of comparison in determining the goodness of fit. Some captions will abridge the dialog. The same information in different words. That is to say, they will describe what is said in the sound track in other words, even 'though in the same natural language. These are useful in educational and learning-difficulty applications. It has always been true that subtitles are NOT verbatim. There are limitations in the number of characters per second that can be displayed via any subtitling mechanism - not to mention the issues when multiple speakers are simultaneously speaking. Part of the art of subtitling (by which I mean the process of creating subtitles for a program) is to capture the essence of what is spoken in a succinct form. In captioning there is a greater tendency towards a verbatim transcript. (SMPTE definitions used). However these distinctions are IMHO far removed from the requirements of a TT standard - which should be to define an agnostic mechanism for the timed delivery of text. Using XML, tags to provide distinction between the text categories (for want of a better term) should be optional, but undefined by the standard. The TT standard should IMHO only **define** tags that are necessary for the temporal control of the display of text. regards John Birch The views and opinions expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Screen Subtitling Systems Limited.
Received on Tuesday, 4 February 2003 12:16:01 UTC