it would probley be cheaper to hire someone to transcribe it to english & someone to translate it to spanish. I know is would be more relaible.

Spend the money to hire a professional translator, if you want a professional job. There is much more to it than simply transposing words from one language to another.
It has to look and/or sound credible to the end user.
If you need a translation and a VO, get one person who does both. That could save you some.

We use a local college as a resource. Often, a professor will either write the translation, or oversee the work a bilingual student has done. Then, we use a native student to read the translation.

We number each sentence on both english and the translated script, so that it's easy to know where each sentence goes. Also, in many cases, some languages "read" at a faster or slower pace than english. For instance, I find that spanish (a more colorful language)translations can be up to a third longer than it's english counterpart. It creates a problem when you're short on video.

With proper oversight, the using the local college has worked well for us.

Mechanical translation can help you get the "gist" of what someone is trying to say, but that's about it. It is extremely crude.

Actually, I know someone who can "fix" a very imperfect, crude Spanish translation. If I can get it to that point, I think I can cover the fine-tuning.

Even if I can only get an audio speech to text English-only software, that would help. Any possibilities software-wise?

Thx so much...

There are tons of them, do a web search.

However as I undertand it they need to 'learn' how you speak. That means speaking clearly into a mic certain specified words. Without being able to do that they're useless.

I've done multilanguage DVDs, even with a reasoneable human translator and speaker it's a problem. The English to French was a laugh. We had a 20 minute program but the French translation ran for 40 minutes!

Making a competent translation involves a lot of "executive decisions" meaning "tough choices".

If there is any kind of terminology involved, you need to do serious research to DECIDE on the right words in each language.

I say DECIDE, because there will often be many choices, but one of the choices will be understood by more people, or in the case of Spanish especially, understood by people from more countries.

Also, academic credentials are no guarantee of quality. I split up one huge translation job between a Mexican-American guy with an M.A. in Spanish & an M.A. in English, and a second guy from Argentina with only high school.

The latter guy did an almost perfect job, with virtually no editing needed afterwards.

The double M.A. produced a mess that took more than a year to fix.

(The high school guy also did work for Sears and other top companies, while the academic taught our kids....)

Caveat emptor (usually translated as "buyer beware", but that's not the only possibility :O).

I've been doing a lot of this lately. I will second the recommendation to avoid mechanical translators. You're much better off (and it's probably cheaper) paying someone than you would be buying a software license.

I also agree that you're not necessarily looking for someone with a lot of degrees -- they miss idiom or odd pronunciations. Usually, translators work from their second language and into their native language. This makes it more likely that the translation will "sound right" to native speakers.

Your best bet is to find a native Spanish speaker who is fluent in conversational English, and has spent some time in the particular country where your audience is. Fortunately, there are very few places in the United States where you cannot find native Spanish speakers.

Colleges are a good resource, but not necessarily Spanish professors. Ask the Spanish Department administrators where they get their translations into Spanish done. Many colleges have teams of part-timers, many of whom are students, specifically for this job. Other resources might be nonprofit or charitable organizations that work in Latin America or with immigrants to the U.S. Ask your local city government or human services office who they use for interpretation services.

The two speech-to-text software programs most often mentioned are Dragon's NaturallySpeaking and ViaVoice which I think is still made and distributed by IBM. I think Nuance now handle's Dragon's product. They'll be lots and lots of errors that need to be corrected before you take the speech from these products and feed it to the translation program.

You'll then need to feed this text to the translator program and, as I already posted, I don't know of any that will get you close enough to really save you any time. If you ever used any of these kinds of programs, like OCR, speech-to-text, or translation, the time it takes to correct all the errors can sometimes equal or exceed how long it would take to just do the job in the first place.