Scottish English

[Karen_Broome at spe.sony.com]

Jefsey,

I felt my question was quite clear.  I asked how to make a distinction 
between narrative audio language in two similar flavors -- English English 
and Scottish English. That's all. 

But for the record, language that appears on signs or within the actual 
picture is not generally something we track as descriptive works data. Our 
primary classification concern is the language (or languages) used to tell 
the story of a narrative film. If there is a non-English sign for a 
French, Hungarian, or Ethiopian restaurant that appears in a film set in 
New York, documenting this really isn't of much use to anyone. Where the 
signs are an important part of the narrative, subtitles may be used to 
assist understanding -- even in the original language. In extremely rare 
cases, these scenes may be reshot as part of the localization process 
(this happened more in silent films than it does today -- today this is 
really only likely in animated works). I still don't see how this presents 
a problem for RFC 3066.

If we did need to track written language actually appearing within the 
filmed frame, this is clearly another instance of text language -- not a 
separate entity called "rendered language." I would make "rendered," 
"closed caption," "audio description" and other language distinctions 
through other fields -- Text Language Type or Language Usage Type. Those 
fields relate to language USE -- not IDENTIFICATION, the goal of RFC 3066. 
I think this is something you are unwilling to accept -- that perhaps 
there is a limit to what should be contained in a tag designed strictly to 
identify the language.

It might be more useful for you to identify other needs separately and 
document solutions for the networking issues you perceive rather than 
twist any question about the identification of language into an 
opportunity to show us how insufficient RFC 3066 is from your perspective 
and call for 11179 compliance.

The original audio language of the film is a Scottish variant of English. 
Whether the film is dubbed by the original actors or a new dubbing cast is 
irrelevant. It's a dubbed version.

You still haven't proven to anyone that RFC 3066 is insufficient for 
audiovisual identification needs -- especially me -- and no one argues 
that there is a need to identify languages found in audiovisual content. 
RFC 3066 is already embedded in many metadata standards that serve the 
motion picture industry and motion picture archives. When 639-6 is 
released, I will be reviewing that standard to see if its added 
granularity, spoken/written distinctions, and taxonomic structure better 
suit our needs. I look forward to seeing it, but it does not exist today.

Karen Broome
Metadata Systems Designer
Sony Pictures Entertainment






"JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey at jefsey.com>
Sent by: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no
10/20/2005 08:24 AM

 
        To:     Speechways at aol.com, petercon at microsoft.com, ietf-languages at iana.org
        cc:     rd at afrac.org, info at afrac.org
        Subject:        Re: Scottish English


At 08:40 20/10/2005, Speechways at aol.com wrote:
Peter, 
Thank you your quick-fire response, even so late in the day. Language is 
important to most of us as a means of personal and social identity, as 
well as a means of communication.  I am not as sure as you are, that our 
colleagues in the media will wish to dumb down distinctions which are 
meaningful to the communities they are portraying and serving.  One of the 
strengths of English (and even more so of Chinese) is that a dominant 
standardised language is backed up and enhanced by a rich variety of 
related but distinctive locally spoken forms, whether these are tagged as 
"languages" or not.  I hope you will agree that such important cultural 
realities should not be swept under the carpet in the formulation of 
globalised standards.
David Dalby
Linguasphere Observatory/Linguasphere ICT

Dear David,
I am not sure it addresses the need of Karen anyway. The discussion has 
changed to tagging a language or another one. But I read her need as to 
tag a picture version (probably more "rendering"?) where the background 
(written spots, names of shops, etc.) is the same, but where the speaking 
is partly different (I suppose the picture may include non Scot characters 
who may have the same script [cinema meaning]). This is the old debate: 
what is tagged. All the existing tools - including future ISO 639-6 and 
RFC 3066 bis are more or less multilingual oriented but not multimodal 
oriented. 

The problem is always the same: in a network environment who is to be the 
master and who is to be the slave? The computer or the person? The support 
of languages is already a big problem - Linguasphere, as an ontology, 
probably addresses without controversy. But what about the modal aspects, 
the new language form (after spoken, signed and written: networked) and 
the new support (after tablets, papiri, stone, paper: multi-media) not to 
speak of the architext issue (here we see that the same architext [script 
of the picture] is rendered differently by the same author - this is not 
dubbing, which is another parallel problem).

I think that only an ISO 11179 (not strictly) conformant approach can 
help. But even in this case, they have not yet approached the "networked" 
nature added to language and the need to add "paradata" to the 
metadata/data model. 
jfc

PS. I always asked myself how to tag the "Ecosse" post on cars.

In a message dated 10/20/2005 6:35:11 AM GMT Daylight Time, 
petercon at microsoft.com writes:

I suspect that for the application Karen is dealing with, fine-grained 
distinctions between varieties of Scottish English (or varieties of Scots) 
is probably not that helpful: generally, the people cataloguing the 
content and the people retrieving the content aren�t going to know how 
to tell them apart. I suspect that all she cares about is the difference 
between heavily-Scottish-accented English (if it isn�t Scots) and 
mildly-Scottish-accented English.

 

 

Peter Constable

 
_______________________________________________
Ietf-languages mailing list
Ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages_______________________________________________
Ietf-languages mailing list
Ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/attachments/20051020/f9d7701a/attachment-0001.html