Getting 'Housewives' To Speak Spanish Can Turn Desperate

[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Brooks Barnes brooks.barnes@wsj.com]
The Hollywood infrastructure can pull off just about anything. Need a 30-foot ape and a Roman army? Done. But dubbing shows for U.S. audiences, with a tight turnaround time, is presenting the networks with a formidable new set of obstacles. ABC decided last summer to become the first old-line network to make its entire prime-time lineup bilingual -- a move that stands to boost ad revenue for parent Walt Disney Co., but one that has strained the network's production cycle. Most of ABC's shows are now subtitled in Spanish, but four high-profile shows are dubbed each week. ABC and its sister studio, Touchstone, face thorny questions about how to translate slang-heavy "Housewives." Producers, translators, studio executives and ABC's standards and practices department can spend hours arguing over the translation of a single phrase.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113444332395120914.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
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