The Art of Marriage is taking on a whole new look and feel. Through the generosity of a FamilyLife donor, the Art of Marriage will now be seen in Spanish with no subtitles.
When The Art of Marriage first took on a Spanish feel, our intent was to reach the third most spoken language as fast as possible. We took the series and subtitled it in Spanish with a word for word translation through subtitles. Since Art of Marriage is not a movie and there is much more dialog, it was not that effective for viewers to keep up with the fast pace and quickly moving subtitles, thus not having the “reach” we desired.
Beginning just after Thanksgiving, the Global Department took on the overwhelming task of removing the subtitles, and finding Spanish actors that could do a voice dub-over in Spanish. It sounds pretty easy once you find a company that can do that for $10,000?! God led us to a company in Miami that would hire Colombian actors and create the Spanish voice track we needed.
Then the fun began for Hal. Global came to the Video Department and asked us to strip all the English voices and leave only the music and sound effects. Once again, it sounds pretty simple - just turn off the English voice track. Easy enough, until we started going through the original files, only to find that there was no ‘voice track’ and everything was mixed together. We eventually found the files with just the voices and were able to accomplish the task. But no, it doesn’t stop there. If you are using Spanish voices, what about all the graphics in English? Art of Marriage is loaded with graphics and text animations, which also needed to be changed. If anyone is familiar with Spanish, the words are not the same length as English, thus requiring us to change a majority of the animations along with the text to make this work correctly.
We praise the Lord for giving Hal the talent to be able to change all the text and animations, saving the ministry over $40,000 to fix the graphics. What a blessing Hal has, to be a small part in potentially reaching millions of Spanish speaking people with the gospel through Art of Marriage. This could possibly be another reason God moved the Drivers to Little Rock.
