It’s been a while since I’ve put a “Here’s an interesting thing I learned today” post out here. It started with this article (from 2013, so the situation may have greatly improved since then):
https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce935435d90
First off – Urdu subtitles are still not really an option unless I find a new source. The Urdu subtitles floating around out there on the usual Subscene-type sites are clearly machine translations with major problems that are obvious even to me. But machine translations may be good enough for creating titles-only subtitles to accompany the Hindi dub (quick background: Hindi and Urdu, when spoken, are very closely related dialects of a language sometimes called “Hindustani” with only a few minor vocabulary differences. When written, however, they are written in entirely different scripts that are indecipherable to each other. So an Urdu-speaking viewer watching a Hindi dub is a quite likely scenario, and Urdu titles-only subtitles for the Greedo/Jabba scenes would help them.
Back to the different families of Perso-Arabic scripts: if it’s hard for people to imagine how a font can make such a difference, Latin-based languages had a similar schism a long time ago. There was a form of writing called Blackletter which was once very common, but it was eventually supplanted by Roman-style text. Today, Blackletter is only really used when people want to make something extra fancy or medieval-looking. If you had to read a whole book in this script, you could still do it, but it would be very slow-going (and you’d probably also think it’d be worthwhile to find the same book in a different font).
And that’s where people seem to sit on the Naskh/Nastaliq divide, except that both styles remain in active use. The Arabic world has gone with Naskh, parts of South and Central Asia have gone with Nastaliq, and Iran sits in the middle, where Naskh is used for everyday usage, and Nastaliq is used pretty much exclusively for poetry and decorative script. Using the wrong font in the wrong place ends up with people feeling that they’re reading some strange, foreign and unnecessarily difficult-to-read text (you may see old Ottoman-era signs with Nastaliq script in Naskh-using areas, but that’s much like Blackletter today – it does still exist, but it’s very limited in usage). But Naskh clearly rules the digital world, and Nastaliq areas just suffer with it. It’s so bad that, according to the article, in Nastaliq areas, people hate using Naskh on their smartphones so much that it has given rise to Urdu transliterated into Latin – a whole new informal, unstandardized writing system created for lack of a font!
So, long story short, when I create these Urdu titles-only subtitles, they will be Nastaliq. But I will likely also create Afghan Persian (Dari) subtitles. Afghan Persian is basically the same as Iranian Persian with a few vocabulary and pronunciation differences, but in written form they’re very, very close, except that Iranian Persian (for non-poetry) is typically Naskh and Afghan Persian is typically Nastaliq. This is not entirely new territory – Simplified and Traditional Mandarin have a similar split, where they’re mutually legible but just feel wrong when used for the wrong audience. Serbian is available in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts, and so on.
And after working with this for a bit, I can also understand why Nastaliq is having such difficulty in a digital world. The script is a horizontally-written (RTL) script, but it doesn’t sit neatly on a straight baseline like most other scripts. Instead, it sort of hangs in the air and words tend to form these beautiful-looking cascading diagonals (which likely present all sorts of issues to the font renderer/shaper). But if you’re pressed for vertical space, that sort of layout can be a problem – and subtitles are definitely pressed for vertical space. Nevertheless, I think I’ll be able to make it work. Nastaliq subtitles will definitely cover more of the screen vertically than their Naskh counterparts, but it seems workable. In my opinion, if you have only a couple seconds to read text before it disappears again, it should be in the easiest-to-read format possible!