Case Study
LaForce + Stevens for INVISTA

Enabling Cross-Market Communication Through Multilingual Subtitling and DVD Authoring.

How iProbe created a multi-language communication tool that could easily be shared with INVISTA's Asian offices.

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The client's need

LaForce + Stevens, a New York-based marketing and public relations firm for leading fashion and retail brands around the world, needed to produce DVDs and CD-ROMs for their client INVISTA, the world’s largest producer of integrated fibers, resins and intermediates, to distribute to company subsidiaries in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Japan and Korea.

LaForce + Stevens asked iProbe to create the foreign language subtitles for those markets and to design and produce the DVD interface concept.

The challenge

The content needed to be subtitled in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Some of the terminology was industry-specific and required knowledge of the fashion and garment industries and it was critical that all four foreign language versions would accurately mirror the ideas and marketing concepts contained in the original English version.

In addition, because of the target audience and their client's brand, LaForce + Stevens needed the final product to look very high end.

iProbe in action

As a first step, we created an accurate transcription of the original video content in English and used it as a base to prepare the spotting script for subtitling.

We then recruited ad hoc teams of professional translators and editors for each of the four languages the project required. Each team included Asian fashion experts with knowledge of the US market (to help with industry-specific terminology) and translators with experience in subtitling. This is because translation for subtitles is particularly difficult; it needs to be more succinct to fit within the "in" and "out" time codes set for each subtitle, all the while retaining the meaning and nuances of the original content. Once the teams had prepared the scripts in the four languages, we converted them into subtitles making sure that the timing of the subtitles matched the video.

As a final step, we authored client-ready CD-ROMs and DVDs of the foreign language subtitled versions with stylish menu graphics and labels that made the product feel high end.