Spanish ASL eBooks

1. Translating

For this project, I was tasked with translating children’s books, The Slant Book and Kevin’s Birthday Party, from English to Spanish. The main obstacle was figuring out the tone and translating the onomatopoeias. For example, most Spanish speakers are not familiar with imperial units, but are rather familiar with metric units. In The Slant Book, one of the lines includes “ten feet high”. Due to what was previously stated, this was translated to “tres metros de altura”, meaning “three meters high”. Moreover, onomatopoeias do not have direct translations, or at least not as direct as other words. I used a list of common onomatopoeias and comic books as references to what is often used.

2. Creating YouTube Videos

After translating the books, I edited existing videos of the books in English and changed the lines to Spanish. I used iMovie and Premiere Pro to edit the books. Videos for The Slant Book and Kevin’s Birthday Party are available on YouTube. After the videos were uploaded, I added English captions to them. The reason behind this is to make it accessible for those who want to learn/read the book in both languages. If we added Spanish captions rather than remaking the entire YouTube video, it could make the viewer feel excluded. Therefore, it was decided to edit the videos and then add English captions.