Inspiration, the Short Film

After editing this version of "Nine Sisters" and beginning the dubbing process, I realized that I had cut out all references to the Nine Muses, the Sisters, so I needed a different title.  Muses bring inspiration, right?  So that's what I chose as the title for this, the Spanish-language version of "Nine Sisters.  In all its glory . . .

Finding Voice-Over Talent

My go-to place to search for talent is Fiverr.com, where people are willing to do the damnedest things for $5.  Many are doing so for portfolio-building purposes.  So I searched for voice-over artists.

Some were non-professionals.  They had only the microphones built into their computers (I wanted better quality).  Some promised to read my text "with enthusiasm."  Hmmm.

Others had experience but didn't respond to email or responded very slowly.  

A good number had experience voicing commercials but not playing roles like Shakespeare and Hemingway.  

Some sounded great but were asking for more than $5.  Egad!  They wanted me to pay them what they were worth!  For my no-budget film.

Lastly, some didn't speak Spanish.  

It all sounded so glorious in my head, and I thought it would be interesting to my Spanish interpreter/translator colleagues as well as something to put on my translation résumé.  I wanted Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf to have slight British accents in their Spanish, and I wanted the rest to have accents from different Latin-American countries.

As it turned out, I got only one native Spanish speaker, and she had only two lines as Petrus, the seriously creepy woman at the beginning.  

And as a last resort, I recorded Edna's voice myself.  Wowza!  It's really strange to see actress Penelope Morgan speak but hear my own voice in my odd-sounding Spanish.  Hahaha.

It was frustrating and slow, but exciting when it finally came together in my video-editing software.  Not perfect, but I'm very pleased, and it makes me laugh.  I hope it entertains others as well!

Disastrous

As a surprise for my cast and the scriptwriter for my current short film, "Nine Sisters," I thought I'd dub the film into Spanish.  I really wanted to work with Chinese or Russian, but I would have no way of evaluating quality.  Since I'm a professional translator, I would be embarrassed if the end-result were absolute crap, so I went with Spanish.

Where was I going to find a translator?  Not the American Translators Association directory, where I could find hundreds of, lovely, qualified, certified translators.  No.  I'd need a budget for that.  So I turned to Fiverr, where people will do the damnedest things for $5.  I found a translator! A native Spanish speaker, someone who worked in an industry requiring precision and who had studied translation, linguistics, and education.  Sounded like a winner to me!  

And then . . .



Que desastre! What a disaster! He didn't read my instructions, so instead of looking at the script I sent him, he listened to the video (in English) and typed in Spanish. I've done hours and hours of this sort of transcription/translation, but no way did I produce the sort of crap he gave me. Very little punctuation, sentences that went on for paragraphs, and he didn't even run a spellchecker. These are very important things in professional translation. And then there were outright meaning errors. The other things can be fixed and perhaps even forgiven, but meaning errors AND all those other things . . .

English: Uhm, I don't know. Maybe a rethink is in order. 
His translation (in Spanish): I don't know. My thoughts aren't in order. 

*facepalm* I know, I know: you get what you pay for, but the other things I'd ordered on Fiverr had been spectacularly good. Ah well. Next time I'll tell you about the voice-over actors.