japanese subtitle issue

[kay]

Hello forum! Haven't been here in years....

Anyway, I am having a problem with both Notepad and Subtitle Workshop when it comes to Japanese subtitles. I just want to make a little video for my computer and Youtube. When I type using my Japanese language pack in Notepad the character appear just fine, but when I save it (.srt with ANSI encoding) the Japanese turns into question marks, and it appears the same in SW.

If I try to put in subtitles in SW itself, the characters either look like dots or jumbled Latin letters.

And I hardly know Japanese, so posts telling me to change my system language won't help(hope it ain't the solution). I have a translation for this vid and just subtitling for fun.


Thanks

[SatStorm]

Did you try UTF-8;
It works for me...

[kay]

I did try that. The subs look fine in Notepad as long as its UTF-8 and .ssa/.ass but no matter the extension SW says the files are bad subs or unsupported.

[jman98]

Most subtitle programs do NOT understand Unicode. I don't know if Subtitle Workshop does or not. If you use a program that does not understand Unicode, what you have to do is go into Control Panel and go to Regional and Language Options -> Advanced and set "Select a language to match the language version of non-Unicode programs you want to use" to whatever is appropriate. This kind of fix enabled me to do some subtitle work in Cyrillic (specifically Russian) where otherwise I was just getting a bunch of garbage.

Or you might try being sure that you have installed the Supplemental Language support files under Regional and Language Options -> Languages. That might also fix it. I can't read any of the CJK languages, so I have no personal experience here. I'm just trying (hopefully) to get you in the right direction to fix this.

[kay]

Would that make my system language change to Japanese?

I actually barely know Japanese *goes to edit topic*
It's just a little vid that I have a translation for and subtitling with english and japanese subs for fun.

[jman98]

Would that make my system language change to Japanese?

Probably.

I actually barely know Japanese *goes to edit topic*
It's just a little vid that I have a translation for and subtitling with english and japanese subs for fun.

If you "barely" know Japanese, I have to question whether you should be doing this kind of work or not. How can you know if the subtitles are even right if you "barely" know Japanese?

Working with subtitles in non-Latin character sets is pretty ugly.

[Ai Haibara]

I don't believe either of those options will make the system language change to Japanese. At least, installing the CJK support never did, for me (though I probably wouldn't have minded ). The Unicode option will probably just give priority to certain encodings whenever Windows displays any Unicode text; I don't know, as I never used it (my Japanese filenames in Unicode text were already working correctly, so...)

[kay]

Since I don't really understand what they do...I ain't touchin it.

I figured out Aegisub can read Japanese so I'm using that.