Japanese all products: formatting of emphasis tags

[jfaltenbacher]

Problem Description

emphasis tags that apply bold and italic formatting are not commonly used in Japanese. For this reason, they did intentionally avoid putting translations inside these tags which caused some validation issues that our Publishing Engineer had to fix at DTP 2. (reported for Edge translations but valid for all)
also see Jira

[tomschr]

Regarding emphasize of Japanese text, I've asked ChatGPT and it came up with these items:

1. Kantanji (Bolder Fonts)

   A heavier or thicker font weight can be used to emphasize text. Some Japanese typefaces include specific "bold" variations.

2. Kenten (点線/圏点)

   Dots, circles, or other marks are placed around or above the text to draw attention. These are common in printed Japanese, especially in textbooks or dictionaries.

3. Prolonged Katakana Usage

   Writing a word in katakana, which is typically used for loanwords and emphasis, can make it stand out, especially in text predominantly written in kanji or hiragana.

4. Different Typeface

   Switching to a sans-serif typeface in the middle of a serif text (or vice versa) can also be a way to emphasize text.

5. Color

   Using a different color for the text is a visual way to highlight it, often seen in educational materials or advertising.

6. Letter Spacing

   Increasing the spacing between characters (kerning) can add emphasis.

However, as you wrote, ChatGPT also notes that "Emphasizing text in Japanese and Chinese is far less common than in Western writing, where bold and italic formatting is frequently used. The difference stems from the linguistic, cultural, and visual characteristics of these scripts."

Technically, I could change color or font size, but if this isn't preferred I could just avoid emphasize ("bold", "italic" or both) alltogether.

[jfaltenbacher]

@tomschr I believe avoiding bold and italic for Japanese would be sufficient

[jfaltenbacher]

Comment from Patrick:
Where I have been finding empty elements in Japanese, I have been asking the reviewer/translator to move the terms inside the elements, so that the XML structure is the same as the English, and the CSS issue in HTML output can be avoided.
What formatting get applied to is something that can be agreed and set in the stylesheets.
It seems that the translator usually wraps the term in corner quotes, like 「ピア」. Maybe the quotes should be autogenerated in the l10n file.