Behind the scenes of MSM's Spanish localization
By Alex Usatine
Chief Editor
Few know the extent of the film content contained within Core Curriculum™ better than Megan LeBleu, MidSchoolMath’s Director of Curriculum. “It’s truly mind boggling how many individual videos are contained within our software. There’s 272 alone for The Math Simulator™, 20 Domain Replays, 136 Teacher Instruction videos, and another 136 Worked Example videos,” she explained. “All of the content has been produced to a high standard with great production value, and each video has closed captioning and Spanish subtitles.”
For ESL students, subtitles allow for low entry access to the materials to support a basic understanding of the content. However, graphical elements, including text often related to math problems, cannot be translated through subtitles. Content producers like Netflix have found that more viewers prefer to watch dubbed foreign content, likely because compared to subtitles ,dubbing decreases distraction and increases immersion into a story and its characters.
Since immersion is central to MidSchoolMath’s approach, they borrowed a page from the filmindustry’s playbook with the goal of seamlessly dubbing and translating the graphical content ineach video in a process called localization.
To prepare, MidSchoolMath’s media production team has been hard at work, cataloging andcompiling all of the video and graphical assets needed for such a conversion. They then reachedout to SPG Studios, a company with over 30 years of experience in localization to complete this vision.“
Traditionally, SPG was a dubbing studio that focused on the entertainment industry,”explains Max Bienvenu, SPG’s senior director of business and series development. “Our legacyclients are companies like HBO, Disney, Warner Bros., where we've dubbed their tentpole movies,their TV series like Game of Thrones, Batman, Inception, and so on. And more recently we’reusing this expertise to benefit other companies in other industries, including education.”
Part of what makes the end result so accessible to the viewer is not only the dubbing of eachactor’s voice by a native Spanish speaker, but in the type of dubbing performed.“
For MidSchoolMath, we’re performing lip-sync dubbing, which is pretty much the top tier version of it,” says Bienvenu. “That’s what you use for movies and any high value content. It’s pretty much matching the live movement, matching every pause. It's a tedious process in thetranslations part and also in the recording. In the recording studio, the actors try to mimic the energy and the emotion, while also making sure that each word is matching the tempo of the original and the breath and the pauses and everything.”
After watching some of the first videos localized by SPG, MidSchoolMath’s Director of ScriptedContent, Michelle Moore observes, “The audio is great, the casting is fantastic and I am amazedat how they are able to write and perform so the Spanish actually syncs up with the originalactors' performance and mouth movements. It’s not like watching the dubbed movies from the1970s! I definitely feel this tool will help the math comprehension of our Spanish speakingstudents.”
Bienvenu of SPG agrees. “In terms of the difference between a full localization versussubtitling, it's very difficult for anyone to look at the bottom of the screen, read the content andwatch what's happening on screen at the same time. You lose a lot of information. A localizationis much better for the student's experience and their understanding of the content.”
MidSchoolMath’s Spanish localization is underway and will be completed in the first half of 2024.
