Template talk:Original caption

For merge discussion see Template_talk:Caption --Tony Wills (talk) 22:22, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

italics+quotation marks

Do we need italics+quotation marks ? It sounds rather redundant.--Zolo (talk) 10:26, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Not sure why italics were added. Let's drop them again. Makes it easier for captions in non Latin script. --  Docu  at 11:31, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Ok, so I have removed them.--Zolo (talk) 13:28, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Lang

Unless I am mistaken (always have a hard time with this /i18n subpage construction), there is currently no way to tag the language of the caption? Jean-Fred (talk) 14:11, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

No there isn't. Would it be useful ? --Zolo (talk) 14:47, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

• Why would you want to? The main purpose is to make a literal record of what was there (usually the text is removed if it was on the image), and have that text searchable. We want it to be displayed "as is" for all readers, not just readers of a particular language. Any alternative translations are part of the multi-lingual descriptions. --Tony Wills (talk) 19:58, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it would be useful. Otherwise, there is no way to know in which language the original caption is ; and it is important to label the language of the text for acessiblity purposes (eg screen readers). I guess one could want to translate litteraly the original caption − which is a different thing than to write a description in another language.

I believe the behaviour should be the same than {{Title}} or {{Inscription}}

Jean-Fred (talk) 14:00, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Are translations accurate?

Excuse my ignorance ;-) But it looks to me as though some translations of the word "caption" are substituting a translation for the word "description". It may of course be that there is no separate concept of "caption" in these languages, but a caption for an image is not necessarily a description of the image, it may be a title, filing information, source information, a commentary or notes etc. It is just whatever text was associated with the image at source or removed from the image. Google for instance suggests "légende" for a french translation of "caption", I have no idea of whether that is a better translation ("original legend" in English would sort of work). I see that wiktionary suggests translations, and there too it has "légende". Thoughts? --Tony Wills (talk) 20:53, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

This is 100% my fault for using this template to mean "original description" for images on my cleanup script. I fixed the script, but I need to go through with AWB and fix the links as well. This probably confused some of the translators. I suggest fixing on sight. Magog the Ogre (talk) 22:38, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

"Légende" is clearly the most accurate translation for "caption" in French but "légende d'origine" sounds kind of odd to me.

Beyond that I think the scope of the template could be defined a bit more precisely. To me, the word "original" seems to refer to texts that are not visible on the image (for instance the description in the source website). To describe texts that are visible on the object/image, like in File:Takahebuller1.jpg, {{Inscription}} seems more relevant. --Zolo (talk) 07:04, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree about text still on the image, that example of usage was aimed at text that was previously on the photo or a caption below it, that has been removed (cloned out etc). eg a museum exhibit might have a label that is photographed with the item, but that part is cropped away. And, yes, also for descriptions on the original website (bearing in mind copyright though), or captions or titles from printed works. --Tony Wills (talk) 08:30, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, re File:Takahebuller1.jpg, I realise that I've used "original caption" on great swathes of those images. I expect to use {{Inscription}} to describe text on a work of art (painting or sculpture), so for the bird illustrations I would use it to describe the artists signature. But the artist didn't create the page layout and printed text. I would find it very strange to describe that sort of caption as an inscription - I suppose if you consider the printed page to be the work of art then it would make sense. I will think some more about that :-) --Tony Wills (talk) 08:57, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Some museums apparently make a disctinction between "inscription" and "markings". However I am not sure the difference is always clear cut, and I doubt we can keep that clean in a crowd-source project. {{Inscription}} does not display the word "inscription" by default {{inscription|my text|type=caption}} shows:

Caption:

my text

It looks okay to me.

The "inscription" field of {{Artwork}} however displays the word "inscription". It could be renamed "inscriptions and markings" but I vaguely recall that it was considered an overkill when the field was added.--Zolo (talk) 09:15, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Standardise and translate the second parameter ("source") ?

At the moment we have a little used second parameter that is for specifying the nature of the caption or where it came from. The idea was to use it to specify things like "from watermark" "removed from image" "published title" "xxx library database" "source website" etc (An image can of course have more than one caption (eg a watermark and a published title), just add multiple {{Original caption}} templates.). Is it practical to have this second parameter translated? Have a bunch of standard source descriptors with translations? --Tony Wills (talk) 21:18, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

{{Removed caption read}}

{{Removed caption read}} appears to be used for some of the functions of this template, redirect it here? --Tony Wills (talk) 11:23, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

+1 -- Perhelion (talk) 20:54, 4 April 2014 (UTC)