Spanish Voice Recordings

First question: Where is the recorded audio going to be used? In the United States, Mexico, Spain, Puerto Rico, Central America, South America… or some combination of the above? Choosing an appropriate accent is extremely important. Audiences can easily be distracted when a narrator’s accent seems “out of place,” and this impairs effective delivery of your message.

Obviously, when the destination is a single Spanish-speaking country, making voice talent selections with appropriate accents is simpler. However, when a voice recording must be used in multiple countries, ASIST will help you select voices and accents that will be most acceptable to the greatest number of listeners. Accordingly, our discussions will include questions about destination countries, which of them represent the largest proportion of the audience.

For Spanish-speaking audiences within the United States, the issue of accents is more complex—as is the selection of target Spanish dialects during the translation process itself. Specific geographical areas may have very high concentrations of a particular Spanish variety—Mexican speakers in parts of the southwestern US, or Cubans in Miami, for example. More than half of this country’s Spanish speakers do cite Mexican origin, but that still leaves a huge number of people who speak other Spanish varieties. People from other countries may not understand some vocabulary that is specific to Mexican Spanish . Often, ASIST will suggest providing multiple terms for certain items, to ensure that your “US Spanish” is as inclusive as possible; however making this flow smoothly in spoken Spanish is an art in itself. In short, you want your recorded Spanish narrations to sound “good” to the largest number of people, and to be understandable by everyone, no matter what variety of Spanish they speak.

ASIST Translation Services, Inc. is a full-service translation agency located in Columbus, Ohio. We provide translation, interpreting, proofreading, voice recording and media production, localization of interactive and Web content, and specialized language services to clients around the world.

www.ASISTtranslations.com

Foreign-Language Video Translations: Basic Tips

When producing a video that you know will be translated to other languages, here are a few simple tips to keep in mind:

Translations often have larger word counts; as much as 25% more in Romance languages, for example. Plan ahead by leaving more space around your onscreen text. If you already crowding the available space in your English original, the problem can get much worse in the translated version.

1. Increased word counts can cause you even more headaches in narrations. Suppose your original English voice-over is cruising along at 120 words per minute, with no big breaths or pauses between sentences or paragraphs. For the equivalent translated voice-over with 25% more words, the narrator has to sustain 150 words per minute. For many situations, this is simply too fast for the message you need to transmit—and will inevitably feel rushed to the listener. If you leave a little bit of extra time around each bullet point or paragraph in your original English narration (perhaps even creating a special edit of the video, specifically for dubbing purposes), you and your audience will be much happier with the translated results.
2. Some languages, like Chinese, Hindi, Farsi and Arabic, use more complex characters than the Latin alphabet used in English. Consequently, the equivalent text in your onscreen titles often needs to be slightly larger in order to maintain legibility. For example, many Chinese characters have very fine strokes that can flicker or “sing” when displayed at a small size on a video screen. Be sure to check with your translation agency about which character sets for those languages are most “video-friendly.”
3. If you build graphics or titles in other programs (Adobe AfterEffects or Live Type, for example) that include text, make sure the source script documents you submit for translation include all this text, clearly tagged as a graphic.
4. Even for languages that use the Latin character set, some fonts don’t support the required diacritical marks (accents, etc.). Obviously, this issue is more frequent with specialty fonts, and in languages such as Hungarian, Czech, and so on. Sometimes the errors are obvious, but in other instances it’s more confusing, because characters actually get switched to something else! For this reason (and many others, such as odd line breaks) always have your final video text proofread by your translation agency before releasing it.

ASIST Translation Services, Inc. is a full-service translation agency located in Columbus, Ohio. We provide translation, interpreting, proofreading, voice recording and media production, localization of interactive and Web content, and specialized language services to clients around the world.

www.ASISTtranslations.com

ASIST Translation Services

ASIST Translation Services, Inc. is a full-service translation agency, offering translation, consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, DTP or page layout, localization, proofreading, foreign-language voice talents for dialog and voiceover, audio-video recording, and multimedia production services in countless languages and dialects.

The headquarters of ASIST Translations is located in Columbus, Ohio, USA.
Please feel free to contact us for more information.

www.ASISTtranslations.com