Spanish Text ?

MUTTLEY wrote on 4/24/2004, 7:31 PM
Alright, I'm doing a video all in Spanish, and btw, I don't know Spanish. So far all is good and right with the world and the clients are thrilled. The part I'm at though has quite a bit of onscreen text. My prob is that I have to type this all in by hand and Spanish has all those neat little dashes, squiglies, and other stuff that obviously aint there by default. Any suggestions on how to do this as painlessly as possible ?

Gracias Amigos !!!

- Ray

www.undergroundplanet.com

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 4/24/2004, 7:39 PM
> Any suggestions on how to do this as painlessly as possible ?

The painless method is to get a Spanish keyboard. As a software developer, we do national language translation all the time. We have PC’s set up with hardware for each language and hire native speaking people to do the translation. Short of that, you need to either memorize the ATL+NUMKEYBAD combinations for these special characters or use the Windows Character Map (in the Accessories / System Tools folder) to copy and paste them.

~jr
MUTTLEY wrote on 4/24/2004, 7:51 PM
Thanks, the Character Map should do the trick. They are talking about doing another one six months or so from now and I'll look into the keyboard option for that one. If this is a one off I'd rather not spend the cash.

Whew, least I can get through this one !

Thanks again !!!

- Ray

www.undergroundplanet.com
aspenv wrote on 4/24/2004, 7:52 PM
In windows, go to control panel, Regional and Language, then go to Languages, Details..., in settings click on Add to add an Spanish, or other language, keyboard.
To switch between the two installed keyboards, just press simultaneously Ctrl+Shift.
In an English keyboard you will find, when you switch to Spanish, that you can find the "ñ" where the ";" is. Overall here are the rest of equivalences (first colummn in English, second in Spanish):

; ñ
: Ñ
< ;
> :
- /
? _
= ¡
+ ¿
- '
_ ?
) =
( )
* (
" ¨
' ´
@ "
# ·
^ &
& /
` º
~ ª
briggs wrote on 4/24/2004, 7:54 PM
If you have the text already in English, perhaps you could run it through a translation software program or even through babelfish.altavista.com. Then just copy and paste.
aspenv wrote on 4/24/2004, 8:05 PM
Briggs...that gives very bad translation results. Is not even useful as a tool for a serious translator-interpreter since the translations are not only inaccurate most of the times, but also very literal.
The job of the translator is to make the idea his own and then reformulate it in the target language. Something that babelfish is very far from achieving.
farss wrote on 4/24/2004, 8:20 PM
Muttley,
I've just done a DVD with chinese titles. Luckily I bought a chinese keyboard while we were in Taiwan, best $50 I've spent. Windows seems to do the foreign language stuff very well.
I've done a bit of chinese titling before but how we did was have the client give to to us as a word doc and just copy and paste it into Vegas.
If you don't know the language well I know it can be a nightmare.
I'm just about to start on my mirst mulitlanguage DVD and the client didn't want to pay for real VO people. MAJOR problems. Even though it's only narration they've translated vernacular english into formal French so it runs MUCH longer and the scenes are quite short.
So a word from the weary, don't let the client talk you into skimping on using people who've had experience doing these kinds of jobs. In the end it'll either not work out at all in which case it's hard to get the client to cough up the dough even though it's his fault, or you'll end up having to charge more for your time trying to fix up the problems than it would have cost for a pro in the first place.