Caption support for Asian languages

Sean Hayes, Makoto Ueki, and I took an action item to explore whether
there is support for captioning in Asian languages. Our finding are
summarized below.

Thanks to Andrew Kirkpatrick and Makoto Ueki for most of this information.

A. Multimedia formats and players:

1. Flash:
 displays CJK (any Unicode)
 editors support creating CJK captions

2. Windows Media Player:
 display big5 and other non-western languages

3. Real Player:
 displays big5 and other non-western languages
 http://service.real.com/help/library/guides/realone/ProductionGuide/htmfiles/realtext.htm

"RealText Language Support
RealText supports a number of languages, including English, Chinese,
Korean, Japanese (Kanji), and many European languages. It can stream
text in any language that can be written in one of its supported
character sets, which are listed in the section "Specifying the
Character Set". Each character set supports at least one font, as
described in "Setting the Font".

 Note: Character set and font support is built into RealText. Therefore,
RealText does not necessarily support all character sets and fonts
supported by various Web browsers.  "

http://service.real.com/help/library/guides/realone/ProductionGuide/htmfiles/realtext.htm#1016678
has more detail.


B. Caption authoring tools:

(No Japanese versions of most of these authoring tools.)
1. MAGpie:
 does ok. Andrew Kirkpatrick managed to get Japanese characters to display;
Makoto was not able to get it installed and working successfully.

2. HiCaption
 No information

3. Captionate
 No information

4. Ccaption
 No information

5. Built in tool in Adobe Captivate
 Handles Japanese characters (and there is a Japanese version of the
tool)

6. Built in tool in Deque RAMP repair tool
 Cannot handle Japanese characters

C. General:

>From Andrew Kirkpatrick: Most of the content that is likely to be
captioned online is done professionally.  If a tv show wants to put
the show online, they've
already worked with a CC firm, so the question is whether the big tools
are capable of handling this, and the answer is absolutely yes.

Received on Thursday, 1 March 2007 20:03:05 UTC