There's times when the overwhelming awesomeness of the Internet comes full force into your life and you realize how times have changed. Depending on who you are, or what you do, it may be when you buy something from Africa on eBay. It may be when you get an opportunity to claim $30 million Nigerian dollars! For me, it's when I get the opportunity to work outside of my typical American comfort zone. Yes, I'm talking about translating Nickie Fleming's book video into Dutch!
As I mentioned in the last post, Nickie wanted to bring her Epic Historical to a larger audience and recognized the book video teaser as a format that will work for that. Especially for her story. However, as we talked about it, she mentioned that her book sold very well and brought national attention to her in her homeland of Belgium. So, being a good and thorough designer, I offered to work with her to translate her video into a Dutch version for just a small additional fee.
I should say that I do not speak Dutch. But since it's Nickie's native language, I knew that she could do proper translation (in which case, she wanted to rewrite the phrasing to match the dialect - makes perfect sense). How does this create issues with motion graphics? Well, for one thing you have to keep in mind that a different language may be 10 characters shorter for a line of text. Or, better yet, 20 characters longer... This requires constant tweaking, adjusting the fonts, position, and re-aligning a bit of the overall design.
It's an excellent and fun challenge. In this image on the right, I show a couple frames. Primarily the main hook of the video, which is in English, at the bottom: "It's About Time You Read Nickie Fleming's Diamonds For The Devil".
The most important thing on approaching a translation if you don't speak the language is excellent communication with your translator (fortunately, this time it's the author herself). I sent her the English script, line by line exactly from the video. She sent back a Dutch re-write, line by line. In most cases this worked out great, but for this title sequence (which is a big deal - the hook!) she sent it as three lines. I couldn't find a way to work with that so I decided to do what was possible to make this work and have the impact of the title sequences.
The first thing I did wrong was put:
Het Is Dus
Hoog (in the large text)
Tijd Om....
But running it through babelfish, I discover that Hoog Tijd translates (roughly, I assume) to "High Time". So, even without knowing the language, I don't want to put emphasis on "HIGH" and break up the flow of the native language with "TIME" after it. The last thing I ever want to do is make an author look silly in their own language, as I can imagine how my marketing message may look if I got someone from India who didn't speak English to place it for me.
So, that issue taken care of, I designed the text around that... And then, we have a tag at the end: Te Lezen. I'm not going to butcher the Dutch language with poor translations, but it appears to be something like "to read" or "of reading" - those of you who speak multiple languages (or even English, really well), will recognize this problem with translating a design object. Sometimes, other languages refer to a noun afterward, instead of before.
All that taken into consideration, it's just a matter of taking an organic approach to redesigning the graphics that need to be adjusted frame-by-frame and look for opportunities to create the same emotional pull. It's not as important to understand the language, as to understand how it works and excellent communication with your translator.
Thanks to Nickie Fleming for her amazing work, made this task as smooth as could ever be possible or asked for. Please be sure to check out her site and her excellent books in English OR Dutch!
Interested in a book video teaser? In English, or French, or Swahili? Visit WayOutSortie.com for more details and to check out my portfolio!
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