NBC Goes Bilingual with Leno, Telemundo Titles
Posted: Tue., Sep. 9, 2003, 10:12pm PT
NBC goes bilingual with 'Leno,' Telemundo titles
Peacock hopes to woo ever-growing Hispanic audience
By PAMELA MCCLINTOCK
NBC's "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" has gone bilingual.
As of Monday night, the No. 1-rated latenight program began providing instantaneous Spanish-language captions, hoping to woo the country's ever-growing Hispanic TV audience, estimated at about 37 million people or 13% of the U.S. population.
Captions are being provided through a partnership between "Tonight" and VITAC, a caption and subtitling company, and Translate TV, which provides real-time machine translations.
"We're thrilled to offer this groundbreaking service to our viewers," NBC Entertainment prexy Jeff Zucker said.
The show draws a "huge audience for NBC, and we're excited to translate Jay Leno's award-winning brand of humor so that more of our friends in the Hispanic community can enjoy it," Zucker said.
"Tonight" is from Big Dog Prods. in association with NBC Studios.
The Peacock's fascination with Spanish goes both ways.
For the first time ever, NBC-owned Spanish-lingo broadcaster Telemundo has begun providing English-lingo captions for two new shows, "La Cenicienta" (Cinderella), from Galan Entertainment, and "Amor Descargado," an original Telemundo novela. Both shows preemed Monday night on the Telemundo network.
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