Audio-visual translation is an art form of its own, which is subject to a series of constraints: spatial, visual and audio. With the right preparation, you can ensure a great outcome for your voice-over recordings.
In this blog and the next one, we will be providing you with hints and tips for the successful translation of scripts that will then be recorded. Here are the first few items to be considered:
- The length and style of a translation:
- Keep the script short and simple.
- Allow for a liberal translation: translating meaning rather than words.
- Each script comes with its own time codes: when putting together the original English script, please take into account that translations into many languages result in more words than in the English source text. Please allow enough time for other languages to be spoken.
- If there isn’t enough time allowed, this may result in the need to adapt and shorten either the original script or the target language versions or both.
- Avoid using redundant terms. For example, if you are describing something and the viewers can see this object on the screen, then you don’t need to have all the descriptive adjectives to go with it.
- When creating the script, you could, for example, replace repeated nouns with pronouns (e.g. ‘the book’ could be replaced by ‘it’) in order to make it shorter.
- Speaking speed:
- Determine your speaking speed.
- When creating a script, it is important to choose the right cadence for your message. Marketing videos, e-learning products or advertisements might need a difference pace of speaking.
- Always make sure that the message is clearly articulated.
We are always happy to help and guide you to enable you to enjoy the business success you deserve with your audio-visual materials. Part two of these ‘Hints and Tips’ will follow in the next blog post.
