Sugar Junkies

Yesterday I recorded the English language voice-over for two Vietnamese feature films at the studios of a Ha Noi company called Thang Long Audio Visual. In my experience Thang Long always does things on a much-too-short time line. Here how the process works:

1. Thang Long receives a film from the client.
2. Somebody Vietnamese watches the film and writes down each line of Vietnamese dialog.
3. A Vietnamese translator with a minimal knowledge of English translates each line into a parody of English. I suspect that the Vietnamese may be run through an automated Viet-English translation program or else the translation is accomplished by translating word-by-word using a Viet-English dictionary.
4. I'm given an e-version of the translated script the day before the English-language version is to be delivered to the client, with the hope that I'll fix up any rough spots in the translation. (I did this a few times. To do a decent job requires 10-20 minutes per page. The typical script runs 40-50 pages. For this editing phase T-L pays $18. I no longer bother editing scripts. T-L doesn't care. They're happy to save the $18.)
5. On the last possible day, somebody prints out a hard copy of the script and pushes it and me into a tiny recording booth where I'm plonked down in front of a microphone to read the (unedited) script aloud while watching the film on a monitor for the first and only time.
6. A Vietnamese producer and a Vietnamese sound engineer with maybe 20 words of English between them do their best to keep my reading synched with the action.

Here are some examples of the 'dialog' I recorded yesterday for a Vietnamese comedy about diabetics whose title in Vietnamese was probably something like "Sugar Junkies," but which was rendered by the translator as "People in Thirst for Sweet":

· Damn it, I can not find him when he's in need
· What a bad thing it is

· Alcohol is my best friend
· How good you say so...look at your rash face peeling off lots of scrab, alcohol will burn your liver as well

· It doesn't worth much
· That's not quite exactly

· Are you killing him? Diabetics would die if taking this kind of juice. Take it away.

· You can not ignore it, regardless your sweet thirsty, you're surely diseased.

· You should change your character to be at ease, you should not angry when being serous diseased.

· Anything poisonous and being in wine burial will take much effect by its contrary use, understand?

· Your pulse gets stuck, outside pulses ruined by hot liver, but it doesn't matter, will be ok.

· I'm dead already, but please don't tell my wife, I have to conceal my wife to treat it.

· I don't talk about electricity, don't misunderstand my opinion. Where is Phan? He's gone for his own business?

· It is not late now but in the long term I can be.

· I think if you drink again, it will be sometimes better, the job is done well, not as present.

· Does your car have something wrong that you have to mortify your body like this?
· I'm training the health exercise.

· Such a greedy, drunk, and oversexed he is!

· Anything happens, please tell us, don't abuse indirectly.

· Some days ago I saw him bring here many tennis tools.

The challenges of this job are manifold:

· read each line of dialog with feeling and expression as if it actually meant something
· resist guffawing
· resist thinking about the perplexed passengers trying to decipher this excruciating nonsense during their Vietnam Airlines flight from Ha Noi to Singapore

Kiss of the Death Devil

You're drifting down a lazy river, trailing one hand in the smooth, glassy water, vaguely aware of a roaring sound off in the distance somewhere. You round a bend and suddenly you're crashing through a maelstrom of rocks, standing waves higher than your head, and rushing, gushing, foaming white water. No, I haven't been rafting this month in the hinterlands of Vietnam. I'm describing how my life has changed since I returned from Dau Vien village at the beginning of February.

My evening classes at Language Link have resumed, of course. And I now have two private students, Toni and Duong, who come to my apartment three times a week in the afternoon. Of course, afternoon is when I edit the news at VOV radio, so there's been some shuffling and scrambling to accommodate everybody.

The editing at VOV has spun off another job for me at a place called Thang Long Audio and Video. One of the translators at VOV creates Manglish subtitles for Vietnamese feature films and documentaries being readied at Thang Long for international distribution. My job is to edit the Manglish subtitles into something approaching English and then—get this—record the subtitles as English 'voiceovers'. I started by doing a documentary on the annual buffalo-stabbing festival of ethnic minority people in the central highlands and followed that with a short documentary about a sacred mountain near Ha Long Bay called Yen Tu, where an ancient Vietnamese king gave up his throne to become a Buddhist monk. 'Narrator voiceovers' sound fairly normal since the documentaries have no dialogue. Last week, though, I did a feature film called 'Kiss of the Death Devil' where my voiceovers were of the more annoying kind—the kind where, instead of actors' voices actually being 'dubbed' by other actors, one person reads the translation of every bit of dialogue in more or less a monotone over each actor's voice. So, for example, you hear yours truly say 'Please, dear husband, save our child' over the voice of a woman crying desperately in Vietnamese, and then, in more or less the same tone of voice you hear me say 'You fool…Why should a Death Devil sacrifice himself for the life of a human?'

This week I edited subtitles and did voiceovers for 'The Punch', a serious drama about a Vietnamese boxer whose life is disrupted by political strife and war. It might sound like fun work, but every profession has its downside. First, there's the serious labor involved in racking your brain to find a more natural way to say 'No one loves cange and stocks but also can't let him influence into the general uprising' or 'Why was it fired branchy?' And then, synching your reading with the on-screen action can be difficult for a number of very good reasons. For one thing, you have to watch the film on a monitor while reading the subtitles from a printed script on the table in front of you, because the subtitles haven't been mixed with the video yet. When one actor speaks off-screen, or speaks with his back to the camera, or when several actors speak at the same time, or when an actor inserts several long pauses into his speech, synching can go awry. A few times I finished reading a subtitle about 20 seconds before the guy on the screen finished talking. The guys at Thang Long don't seem to care much. Almost never were they willing to do a second take. And although they chided me once for rustling my pages, they seemed oblivious to workmen downstairs knocking down a brick wall with sledge hammers and making so much noise I could barely hear the sound track in my head phones.

I'm still studying Vietnamese 2 nights a week with Thu, meeting my CELTA colleagues once a week for lunch, chatting with some combination of Miss Nga, Thai Thu, Hong Ha, or Bich Van every day, corresponding by email with (and correcting the emails of) a growing number of students, taking lots of photographs, editing some articles for Mr. Dai's promotional magazine, trying to keep up with world news on CNN, and reading Don Quixote. It's surprising how much you can accomplish when you have no significant other to erode your productivity with things like nagging you to repair that leaky faucet, arguing about where wet towels should be hung, discussing which restaurant you should go to for dinner, or hugging and kissing you.

By the way, I found out why there are no geckos on the wall of my apartment. There are no geckos because my spider ate them. From time to time, I've caught a movement out of the corner of my eye which I thought might be a shy gecko darting behind the sofa. There is certainly plenty of opportunity for geckos to come and go when my terrace doors are standing open. But to date there have been no confirmed gecko sightings. Then, a few nights ago, I saw crawling up the wall in the sitting room a form too large to be a cockroach (they seldom exceed three inches in length here) and too small to be a rat (they're seldom smaller than a shoe). It turned out to be a spider reminiscent of a tarantula without his fur. It was about the size of my hand. If your hand is bigger than mine, the spider might have been the size of your hand. I thought right away about killing it so I might sleep better at night, but I had no shotgun or flame-thrower and I didn't want to take a chance on simply wounding it, so I called for backup and for the next hour stayed well clear of it (I remembered the jumping spiders at the World Hotel). They say you should never turn your back on a dangerous predator, but I did at one point, and when I turned back it had disappeared. Now I sleep with a heavy book on my night stand (Don Quixote).