VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Rena]

I just thought this was interesting.

My husband and I have been away for a couple of weeks in Japan. (The reason why I have not been posting.) While in Tokyo, we ventured out to both Tokyo Disneyland and Disney Sea, which were incredible. Being someone who doesn't speak Japanese, it was a little (just a little) hard to get completely into the experience because all of the audio which narrates the rides has been rerecorded in Japanese, which I TOTALLY understand. It makes sense because the park is located in a Japanese-speaking country.

I think that one of the reasons I couldn't completely connect with the audio was because everything sort of sounded the same. No, I don't speak Japanese, but I can still identify the tones, inflections, enthusiasm, and character of the work. I felt that a lot of it just didn't fit the scenes, making them hard to believe.

It could also be a cultural thing. I know that different cultures have different standards and expectations of communication.

Big props to the designers of the parks though, especially Disney Sea. The attention to detail was amazing!

Has anyone else noticed this in foreign countries?
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Rena
I am officially Rena for good.

[heyguido]

Spent my formative years as a military brat....grew up in more places than most people see in their lifetime.

Learned varying amounts of more than a few languages along the way. Tone, pitch, and inflection, in particular, can vary from language to language, and, occasionally, between dialects.

Wish Liz were here to comment, as I know she's multilingual, too. But, I suspect she's getting a real world workout right about now.
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Don Brookshire
"Wait.... They wanna PAY me for this?"

[Bish]

I have two Italian production houses as regular clients. My job is to re-voice documentary narrations so their stuff can be sold on the international market or hit the documentary film-festival circuit. Usually, I get the original to work off, so that I can get the timing right and slot in nicely between the subtitled talking-heads. The work ranges from dramatic retrospective reports on disasters to lighter natural history pieces. Usually, I just cannot get a handle on the inflection and intonation of the original Italian narration... there seems to be very little light and shade... to me it's just sounds flat and fast! ... And yet, they give me specific direction for the tone and feel they're looking for.
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Bish a.k.a. Bish
Smoke me a kipper... I'll be back for breakfast.
I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls.

[ccpetersen]

You've hit on one of the interesting facets of localisation -- and I'm going through that right now with the light pollution video we did. It is being translated to 17 languages. We're doing the versioning here so that we can make the words match the scenes. In many of these the inflection and pitch stays pretty much the same, so we have to rely on other cues -- perhaps an English word that they use because it didn't translate.

We were working on the Japanese translation the other day and the narrator ended the last sentence with an up intonation, almost as if there's more to come. But, that was it. So, we checked with the Japanese translator and he said that that was the way it is in Japanese.

It's a fascinating area...
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Charter Member: Threadjackers Local 420

[Lee Gordon]

CC, I imagine in your case, you have to keep a very close eye on the translations so that "light pollution" gets translated to mean "pollution caused by light" rather than "pollution that is not heavy."
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Lee Gordon, O.A.V.
Voice President of the United States
www.leegordonproductions.com
Twitter: @LeeGordonVoice

[Scott Pollak]

Not sure if this really relates, but I have a regular client in India that hires me to voice aircraft maintenance narration (in English of course) but they always have me narrate.... it.... very..... very..... slowly (which is good for me, because they pay me by the finished audio hour). But I'd guess I'm speaking at around 110-120 wpm vs the more normal 150-160 for U.S.

I have no idea who is seeing the finished products, but if it's native English-speaking people, they're probably wondering why the heck the narrator is speaking soooooooooooooo.............................. damn................... sloooooooooowly.
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Scott R. Pollak
Clients include Pandora, NPR Atlanta, Wells Fargo, Cisco, Humana, Publix, UPS, AT&T, HP, Xerox and more.

www.voicebyscott.com

[Rena]

CC, that is really interesting. So, in addition to learning certain foreign languages, one could assume that there is more to communicating in that language than just the words.

I knew this was true for tonal-based languages like Vietnamese, but I just assumed that the languages which are not reliant on tones for meaning were all as enthusiastic as English.

Now that I think of it... all PA or street announcements that I heard while in Japan were very flat-sounding. So, what you're saying makes sense.

I wonder what locals must have thought about me when seeing me communicate with my husband in public??? I'm Italian-American. I tend to be on the "expressive" side. Hah.
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Rena
I am officially Rena for good.

[D Voice]

Standard Japanese is typically very flat. It is a non-stressed language, with the verb at the end of the sentence.

Particularly in Japan and Asia, things are much more stylized. The PA announcers at baseball games are usually women, in high-pitched, hyper feminine voices.

When in English, they generally want things slower, well-enunciated, and slightly hammed up. It's a different read, a very different scene.

[ccpetersen]

Lee, actually, the "light pollution" hasn't been a problem, as far as we can tell. However, the Turkish version translation appears to use the word "charcoal" for "coal" as we look at the coal train in the video. I can just see a whole generation of students seeing that video and thinking that it takes a trainload of Kingsford briquets to power a light bulb.

About the Japanese -- I've heard some shows in Japanese that have some intonation and inflection in the voices, but they are mainly for children. And, even MORE interesting: most planetarium shows in Japan are considered to be for children only. So, you get these anime-type voices, or very very high and squeaky. Our show "Larry Cat in Space" was translated into Japanese and I laughed my ass off when I heard some of it.

There is one show that we saw both in Japanese and English called "The Celestial Railroad". The Japanese version is fairly flat, with some intonation. The English version is much more dramatic -- as if they told the actress to really act. And so she does. The same company did another show about the Greek legends of the stars and in the English version, as she tells the story of how the gods gave up on humans after humans took all their gifts and turned them to war, the actress is almost weeping. Yet, in the Japanese version, in that very same scene, she's almost unnaturally serene.

Now, when I'm at international conferences and there are groups of Japanese there, they seem to be quite animated in their conversations, but that somehow doesn't make it into narrative style. It could be a cultural thing, or some sort of assumption that narrated material (except for kids stuff) is supposed to be neutral. I dunno. But I do find it fascinating.

In Korean there's a sort of "null-meaning" syllable that shows up at the ends of some sentences, not sure why it's there.

Mark is the one has to cut and patch the narrations to the video once we get the voice-over files. He's really really good at it. Back when he used to work at a studio in the late 80s (and tape was still the order of the day) his nickname was "Fastest Razor Blade in the West".
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[Rena]

This is really interesting. CC, that is my question too. How is it that some of the Japanese are so animated, while others are so monotone? The people I observed in the streets announcing sales at the storefronts made it seem like acting robotic and flat was practically part of the script. Conversations I would have with random Japanese people were met with much more enthusiasm. This just all got me curious about cultural standards and expectations of communication and entertainment.
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Rena
I am officially Rena for good.