SRT files w/ foreign characters & SRT file name conventions

[david k]

I want to create SRT files for captions in a number of different languages, including some which do not use an English alphabet character set, such as Chinese and Vietnamese. I have someone working on the translations for these, and I understand the basic layout/conventions of the SRT file, but ...

* Once I cut and paste my Chinese and Vietnamese characters into a document, when I go to save it as a TXT file, how do I do this so that it saves the characters/fonts for these langagues? My understanding is that when I do a 'save as' in Word, there are some encoding options that come up for saving it to Txt, and I just have to pick the 'unicode' option. Is that about it?

* And, once I've saved my .txt file and then changed the file name to an SRT extension, how does either my editing program and/or the 'hosting' venue (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo) know that a particular caption is for a particular language - how does it know that 01.srt is Chinese and that 02.srt is Spanish, and so forth?

I've read that there are language/country naming conventions for SRT files - such as:

vi_VN for Vietnamese, and zh_CN for Simplified Chinese, and so forth. But does this mean that for my Chinese caption, I'd simply name it:

zh_CN.srt? And that by doing this, people watching will have the option to select simplified Chinese captions and that this is file that will be used for those captions?

Thanks, David.

[Stan Jones]

Do not use Word to make the text file. Use a text editor such as Notepad++. Copy/paste the word transcription into the text editor, then work from there. The encoding (e.g. UTF-8) can create problems. And line ending style ([CR][LF] etc) can be an issue. I thought I had some notes on this, but I don't see them at the moment.

I don't know the language conventions. But I think you must tell the YouTube importer which language you are using. There are an amazing number of variations on file format (even within .srt).

Let us know what you find. I'll try to look at this further.

[Yossi.Siegel]

Perhaps anyone has more info on this? I'm stuck strying to import a foreign language SRT into various software, and none recognize the foreign characters. They translate them into random characters...

[Stan Jones]

This is an old thread. What version of PR are you using?

Stan