Japanese Subtitles

Beanie wrote on 9/25/2007, 12:26 AM

Here's a tricky one:

A client has asked us to put japanese subtitles on a DVD for release in Japan.

i can get a transcription typed in japanese, supplied as a text file. Question is, will DVDA allow me to import the txt and actually display it in Japanese script?

I have already installed the East Asian Languages files on WindowsXP and so DVDA can see the MS Mincho font in the list.

I don't have any txt files typed in Japanese to try it out. If i choose that font in Word, it still types in English. If it was originally created using a system configured for Japanese input, then emailed to me, will i be able to display it without doing further setup adjustments on windows?

cheers
ken

Comments

bStro wrote on 9/25/2007, 7:02 AM

I just downloaded a Word doc that was written in Japanese, copy and pasted some of the text into a DVDA subtitle, and set the font for that subtitle to MS Mincho. It displayed in Japanese. (Well, I assume it's Japanese. Could've been Korean or Chinese for all I know. But it wasn't English, that's for sure.)

As long as you don't have to type anything yourself, you're probably okay.

Rob

Beanie wrote on 9/25/2007, 9:29 PM

Hi Rob

yeah cheers for giving it a go, I have managed to do the same but it took me a few goes because of the way windows will encode a text file.

I got a japanese word doc and saved it as a .txt file. when you do this, windows then pops up a "file conversion" dialogue box. it gives a preview of your text and you have to select the text encoding type. i clicked "other" and selected one of the japanese settings from the list. the preview looked fine.

after saving, i imported the txt file into DVDA but even after choosing MSMincho as the font, it still displayed random symbols.

i remembered reading something about japanese text and "unicode" (whatever that is) - and unicode is one of the choices on the text encoding list so i selected that instead and this time DVDA read the text just fine.

did you go thru all of this?

anyway cheers
ken

bStro wrote on 9/26/2007, 6:51 AM

No, I just copied some text directly from Word and pasted it into a DVDA subtitle event. That method, of course, would be tedious for doing a whole transcription.

Rob

Rich Reilly wrote on 10/4/2007, 8:37 PM

Just make sure it's sufficiently out of synch with the voices ;)

MPM wrote on 10/15/2007, 9:59 AM

My understanding is that there are special spacing problems plus some Asian languages/applications need to be vertical. A while back there was some work done on sub software with this in mind -- don't know how far it got but may want to check/search the sub forum at videohelp.com.