I enjoy watching Univision sometimes, as I like the style of programming, etc. But, my Spanish is very rudimentary, and I’m lucky if I can get the gist every five minutes or so.
Aside form the obvious solution (which I may approach again), is there an appliance, fix, doo-hickey or whatever by which one can view closed captioning in English or an ‘SAP’ sort of thing of Spanish-language programming?
If you’re thinking of a type of universal translater, then nothing like that exists yet. And of course if the information isn’t present in the broadcast, then there’s nothing for a machine to give to you (you know, like alternate captions or secondary audio program.
Given that, El Clon (I don’t know which channel it was) did have English as a secondary audio program (or was it captioning?), so the Spanish channels at least do stuff like this once in a while.
My Spanish is rudimentary as well. When i watch Uni, I turn on the closed captioning feature of my TV. The audio combined with the CC text (in Spanish) really helps.
Here in NYC, my sister has Time Warner Digital Cable. It’s equipped with English-subtitle closed captioning. I had a great time watching Spanish-dubbed Futurama reruns with English subtitles.
Telemundo has several programs (usually telenovelas or soap operas) that are subtitled in English if you turn closed-captioning on. Very helpful if you’re trying to learn more Spanish, but sometimes the translation doesn’t quite match what they’re really saying…
Nuke, which ones? All I remember is El Clon. Everything else I see has Spanish subtitles (probably 'cos I have CC3 or CC4 on or something).
Toadspittle, I think that’s Cartoon Network. I get a lot of the cartoons in Spanish, 'cos I have the DirecTV set to “Spanish When Available,” and it’s the Futurama’s on Adult Swim that I particularly like (and my wife can finally understand why it’s good fun for me). The problem is some stations, like some of the Turner stations, broadcast stupid “You are listening to the secondary audio program” messages instead of just broadcasting nothing (which would make the receiver and most SAP televisions default back to English automatically). Since everything we watch is Tivo’d, it’s not like I can switch the receiver back to English and make the stupid message go away. Whom should I complain to about this…?