SOLVED

Captions showing letters with accents as '?'

Deleted
Not applicable

I'm deploying a video to a dozen different countries, so I have a dozen different VTT files so viewers can select the language they want when they're watching the video.  However, all letters with accents are currently being replaced with a '?' in a diamond instead of the actual letter.  This means that countries like Spain, Portugal and Sweden are having a lot of trouble reading the captions.  

 

Is there a way to fix this myself? Or is it a bug that needs a central fix? 

4 Replies

Hi @Deleted it looks like this may be a character encoding issue. How are you generating the VTT files? Do you know if they are utf-8 encoded? Can you uproved an example VTT file that displays the '?''s please?

 

Thanks!

best response
Solution

It is important after translating the transcript file to save the file as UTF-8 encoded. 

I can confirm that special characters DO INDEED WORK as long as the file is encoded UTF-8, which can be done from the top menu of Notepad++, by choosing Encoding > Convert to UTF-8!

Hey! I don't have Notepad ++ and I am having the same problem. I am doing my VTT files with notepad windows. Is there another way to fix this?

@Mariel Vargas I don't know if you solved this already, but you can save them as UTF-8 encoded straight from normal Notepad. Just choose "Save as" and beneath the file type, you can choose which encoding you want to save it as.

 

I did this for all my subtitles and it works well!

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response
Solution

It is important after translating the transcript file to save the file as UTF-8 encoded. 

I can confirm that special characters DO INDEED WORK as long as the file is encoded UTF-8, which can be done from the top menu of Notepad++, by choosing Encoding > Convert to UTF-8!

View solution in original post