Advertisers- Some Hints on Using Spanish in Ads and Content

For the last six years, Adelante has offered translation services for advertisers wishing to reach a bilingual audience. Sometimes our graphics department handles the placement of the corresponding Spanish, and sometimes the advertisers do it themselves. When our clients place the Spanish on their own, those who are not familiar with the language may run into some very minor issues:

• Forgotten/left off/cut off accent marks. Accent marks and tildes in Spanish are imperative. Leaving these off can change the  meaning of words. Although Adelante staff handles one last proofread before the print run, we recommend that advertisers double check all special characters. In addition, those advertisers who turn in PDFs would need to make the change themselves, generally, anyway. Better to skip that last step- especially right before printing!
•  In Spanish, article titles are not published in title case. Title case means that most of the words are capitalized. Instead, Spanish uses sentence case or “down style” for titles of articles. If we’ve provided your translation, it’s likely you noticed the difference. At times, clients who provide their own translation capitalize anyway. Depending on your work load, our work load, and our print deadline, we may or may not point this out and offer revision.