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Julian Hale's avatar

This is not such a problem if those producing podcasts call on professional translators with experience of podcasting. I speak French, Spanish, Italian and German plus have produced podcasts in German and French. There is a fee to be paid for this professional service. Relying on AI alone is not a good idea as the result will sound stilted, unnatural and there will probably be mistakes. My advice - consult a language/podcast professional such as me and pay a reasonable fee for the translation/adaptation service. A translation of this kind is a highly skilled job.

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federica capozzi's avatar

I think this is a major issue, in particular if your podcast is NOT in English. I mean - I am Italian, and my podcasts are in Italian, and I know this would be a great limit, if I wanted to target the European market. I agree with Julian that AI is not enough. Actually I tried my hand at it: I dubbed 2 seasons of a podcast using Rask.ai, cloning my own voice and using synthetic voices for my guests. It was a time-consuming process, because I had to edit all the translations and have them checked by an English mother tongue (they were awful), but in the end, it was quicker and cheaper than hiring a professional native dubber. I would have LOVED to hire a dubber: but my client didn't have any budget left and, most of all, we didn't have time. As for the result, it's acceptable, but still far, far away from what a human being can do. In my opinion, AI is still too "young" to use it on a regular basis. It could be acceptable if you need to translate a podcast for a practical reason, though - in my case, the podcast was a kind of audioguide for an exhibition, and we wanted to make it available for foreign visitors, too.

well, if you are curious, here's the link to the AI-translated show: https://open.spotify.com/show/0qK3VLFyttHTraGnZSt0gM?si=6ff5d968490b4f71

I'd love to read your comments about it!

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