Voice over

The voice over went well. The boss said that it should take about 2 hours when I arrived at about 6pm, but I knew it would take longer than that.

I love public readings. I love documentaries. I like to read out loud when I'm alone sometimes. Just to try the words. Sometimes a text gets even better when read out loud. Sometimes not.

Anyway, she said it would only take a couple hours but I knew it'd take more than that. Because I have a high opinion about how good documentaries narrators sound and also because I know that I'm not the kind of guy totally immune to fits of uncontrollable laughter.

I can't even undergo a medical examination without having to resist bursting out laughing after the first two minutes.

So I hoped for the best and started reading my translation in front of the mic, and everybody in the middle of the company's office main and only room — they don't have a recording studio yet.

The first two hours were OK. I had to redo the first sentences a couple of times because I had to find a volume level that would satisfy the sound engineer (i.e. loud enough to cover the boats' horns and Fire Department and cops sirens 21 stories below,) and be able to keep it with as little ups and downs as possible.

After two hours, the exercise proved tiring, though. Especially since it involved more than just read. Being the only French speaker in the room, I also had to make sure I just hadn't mispronounced something, that I hadn't missed a line, that the tone of my voice was in accordance with the text. That's a lot of things to do in public over more than 20 pages of single spaced text. I hadn’t seen the video yet, I had no playback. So I had to simultaneously read a sentence, then make sure I had pronounced it right while reading the next etc.

Also, the guy who was going to do the audio-video sync late, had put some marks on the English text. When I arrived I was told to transfer them on my translation, since the guy couldn’t read French, but still needed to know what sentence went with what image. Since the text was so awfully written that I had had to edit it a lot, some sentences that were just useless or way too corny or inaccurate never made it into the French version. The problem was that the guy had marked them. All of a sudden some of these sentences became important because they were triggering a new image or sequence and I had to improvise a couple of translation… Yeah, I know. It doesn’t sound very professional… But really, those sentences I’m talking about, they shouldn’t have made it into the final version…

Also, at some point the boss left to be replaced by a bigger boss. I supposed he had to stay to close after us and maybe make sure we weren't going to steal the material. Anyway, he was always fidgeting and loudly turning the pages of magazines right in the middle of our recording. At some point he fell asleep in his chair and started snoring. I knew it wasn't loud enough for the mic to pick it up. And I really tried to ignore it. It was maybe just ten minutes after my big uncontrollable laughter and I didn’t want to antagonize the sound engineer with whom I had a great feeling so far. But I felt that he was getting tired and wanted to go home. I could tell that by the way he would launch the recording, then weakly wave at me before resting his head on his arms crossed on the desk. Maybe the snoring was not loud enough for the mic, but that was enough for me. I tried to finish my sentence without letting the incoming laughter change the tone of my voice. And then I just gave up and burst out laughing in the mic which had two simultaneous consequences: wake up the snoring boss and making the sound guy jumped too (he had headphones on.)

Earlier, I had had two sentences I thought I’d never be able to read. We did the take maybe 20 times. Probably more. It’s because the text was about flame balls — flammes en boules, in French. So, yeah, “balls” and “boules” also have the same connotation, but on top of that “boules” has this weird, funny sound when you pronounce it. The kind of thing that you only notice when, really, you shouldn’t. I almost made it to the end of the first sentence where the word occurs. If I had, it would have helped a lot, because the engineer could have cut after, and then I’d just have had to do the other sentence. But I didn’t make it so it took me a looot of time to be able to read the first sentence without laughing. And then some more to be able to read the second sentence.

So yeah, I was done by 2 a.m. Home by 3. Reading stuffs till 4:30. Then wake up at 8 to prepare to go to work for the brunch at the restaurant.

Razor's edge

Can’t stay in place.

Today, I’m supposed to do my first professional voice-over for the documentary I just translated, but they still haven’t told me when it’s supposed to happen. Hello guys!... pick up the phone already.

But that’s not the only reason I’m all nervous. Any day now, I’m going to receive an email. Now, depending on the content of the email it’s going to be heaven or hell. Well, not hell. But just, heaven or not heaven.

I’ve been waiting for two weeks now since I had the interview. Why do you think I had my hair cut? Two weeks. I have been lucky to have this translation assignment to do. It kept my mind off the calendar for a while. But now I this big “falling in the void” sensation every time I check my emails.

Word badly crashed two days ago. The translation itself was over, but it still needed to be proofread and improved. And then, FUBAR went Word. That was beautiful. A pure masterpiece in the art of failure like only Microsoft(TM) can create them. Still, I suspect you need to be an engineer to be able to fully admire the beauty of it.

“Winword.exe has generated errors and will be closed by bla blabla” I tried everything to fix it. Had to. I couldn’t even open my translation file anymore! And if I somehow tried to copy/paste the content, the problem would transfer itself to the new document. Five in the morning and I’m so desperate that I even do the unthinkable — I check Windows’s website. I followed their step by step procedures, but of course it turned out to be just a loss of time. Because if everything else failed, then the last step requires you to use the driver. Come on guys. If I had the damn driver in the first place, I would just wiped the shit off my computer and reinstall it clean and all.

When something like that happens, I almost wish I had a Mac. You wonder, how they can let Microsoft release softwares that have so many problems? Why don’t I use one of those free fool-proof word processors? Maybe because you don’t want to send a resume or an assignment using a software that 0% of professionals have heard of. Professionals actually buy the drivers and they have the computer guy who use the company’s broadband to download cool stuffs all day long. And who’s gonna tell him anything? He’s the computer guy. He can use technical lingo that will make your head ache for the rest of the day. He’s the one who rats on other people who surf the web during work. He’s not likely to turn himself in. But I digress. So yeah, they just get the computer guy out of his closet and have him do the dirty work.

But I digress as usual…

And then I said fuck it, well, maybe not, but oh well… and went in the registry, erased a key line and VOILA!!! I could open my work again!
By then, it was late enough in the morning to ask my roommates if someone had an Office driver more recent than Office 97. One of them had and I upgraded mine just to make sure the problem won’t appear again later. Then I upgraded the upgrade.

Then I offered myself an extra round of scandisk, anti-spyware, anti-adware, so I could have a break in the meantime; and I still finished my work ahead of the deadline.

Now I have an upgraded version of Word so the toolbar looks all modern and all and there are probably new functions to be found and it feels great. Did I say that? Does it sound as pathetic as I think? Like my happiness level for today rest on a word processor?
Wish I had some Xanax or Lexomil. Just to smooth the edge…

Plaza Hotel

My life is all humbling moments. I suppose that’s what George would say. You know. George. In Seinfeld.

So I’m given this great opportunity to translate a documentary on NASA into French. That was last week. Deadline is this Friday and it’s done already. It wasn’t easy though. And not for the reasons that would first come to mind. The reason was that the English version was so badly written.

The evening I show the script to Sara, is the night she is going to meet her friend B. at the Plaza Hotel. So we meet on the place in front of the Plaza and walk to the Park and sit down on a bench and I show her the script and she bursts out laughing reading the first pages. She pulls out a pen from a pocket of her coat and starts editing the text, still laughing. So I say, “So what do you think? It’s not good, right?”

She laughs, she edits. I am looking at the sky, looking at the stone bridge. There are 20-odd pages. After the first 5 I have to take the manuscript from her hands. I ask again, “So what? You don’t have to edit it, you know. It’s bad English but I understand what the writer means. I just need to know how much I can rely on the text.”

Sara says, “He/she must be German. It’s very German.”

That was last week. Two days after I got the job and the script. What I am thinking then is I should tell the boss that the English version needs to be edited by an American. After all, my name is going to be associated to the project. The boss is of European origins. Maybe she did not notice. So I write a long email to explain my doubts about the English text. How the voice-over cannot possibly be done in English with this version. I also say that I found out some technical inconsistencies and that I have to fact-check all the info in the documentary before I can even start translating.

I say, “I took the liberty to show the text to a friend of mine who is a professional editor. She found a lot of mistakes and things that you just don’t say in English. She said the writer was probably German.”

I’m thinking, my name is going to be on the credits. I’m thinking, you shouldn’t send this email.

I show the first pages of the script to some American friends. They all confirm what Sara said. So I send the email. And then I go to sleep.

The next morning I have an email waiting for me from the boss. She thanks me for mentioning this. I feel relieved. Then I read the next sentence.

The next sentence is, “I will mention this to our native American writer.”

The first expression that came to mind was, “worst case scenario.” The documentary was written by an analphabet. But an American one. Goodbye credibility. This was your first and last translation for them, dumbass.

I think about Sara in the park, editing. The red sky and the dirigible that kept flying silently around the Plaza Hotel like a fly around… well… you know… How I told Sara that the day I am rich and successful I’ll pay to have the dirigible display absurd slogans in red letters and all. Or maybe “The world is yours.” A rat runs from the pond to the bushes. Like a hardboiled parody of the 2 extra cute squirrels we saw on our way to the bench and that were posing in front of my cameras like old pros.

Finally, I got in touch with the writer. She explained that she knows the text sucks. She tells me that she had been given an impossible deadline.

I don’t usually rat on people. But really, you should read the sentences I had to translate. Translating a badly written text is as much difficult as translating something written by a genius. Except it implies more work. You fix/translate a sentence, and then the next one that was almost ok in the original version is no longer good now that you have edited the one that precedes so you have to fix that one too as you translate it but then it’s the whole paragraph that needs to be rewritten. Next thing you know you have rewritten the whole text.

And when you find mistakes about facts the documentary is about then you know you have a problem, Houston.

Reading this text almost convinced me that I should be more careful with my entries here. I know they are a breeding tank for typos and grammatical monsters.

I walked into the Plaza of course. Wouldn’t you? I liked the inside. High ceiling, columns and marble. Nobody wearing flipflops there -- looks like heaven.
It was the people inside I didn’t like. There must have been some party going on, because there were those dudes in tux that kept coming in. Half the stones that were around the necks of the old biddies accompanying them, they would have represented enough money to buy the whole block your living on. They were not all old though. I remember that beautiful girl with long dark hair in a long, silver, tight evening dress. The lad at her arm — young clean, Norman Bates-like — he looked like his morning he had invented a cure against cancer, AIDS and myopathy while he was putting gomina in his hair in the bathroom.

I had to get out. That was enough. The shiny silverware. The red carpet. The crystal chandeliers. The evening dresses. The hostess with her black dress that left her back naked, and only partially covered her breast so that, really, the only thought of wearing a bra was ridiculous. She was standing there. Greeting those guys. Her dress, I thought they were only wearing them on TV shows like the Oscars Ceremony. Because, when you see them in real life, up close, they don’t really cover anything, those two wide stripes of fabric falling from the neck to cover a nipple each. While trying not too look like I was looking at her breast I wondered in what kind of places she was living in. Was she doing that full time? What would be the peak of her professional hopes? Greeting Paris Hilton? She was beautiful. She was cute. Was she doing that to pay off her loan for med school? Or was she hunting Sugar Daddies on the side? She had a dress and black high heel shoes that had turned me into a replica of one of the big columns of the main hall. If on top of that, she was returning her dress to a rental shop after her shift and took the subway to go back to her dump in some shitty neighborhood, then my heart was hers.

I pushed the revolving doors. Outside, the limousines were waiting in the night.

Well, the Elevated... again...

So it's a beautiful day and I'm going to Manhattan but, know what, I'm not even late, I have a translation assignment (hell, I have two!) and because of the sun and Spring and all girls look beautiful and seriously cut down the number of clothes layers. I'm two steps from the stairs of the Kosciusko station when I notice that Kennedy's (the local burger joint that could be my official sponsor if burger eating was a Olympic Sport -- it still can happen one day, I'll be ready) has change it's sign. The old yellow one claiming in proud red letters "Pizza and Chicken" has been replaced by a huge protuberant semi-circle thing that would perfectly fit in on Times Square.

That's when it gets interesting. Now, keep in mind this is taking the middle of a nice day and warm day in a public place.

So, I notice the huge sign and my inner voice has the French equivalent of "What the fuck?!" blocking my synapses. This happens at the exact moment when my right foot is going up after the first step of the station's stairway. Right Foot is OK, you know, not Einstein, but usually he does his jobs. Not this time though. He misses the first step. I kinda loss my balance but not totally though and immediately dispatch Left Foot to attempt to attempt an emergency landing on Sneaky Step One. Left Foot fails too. Now I'm totally out of balance, falling towards the steps at a speed that I didn't monitored accurately but that I would safely qualify of "fast enough to break your teeth on the steps." Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that I had my hands in the pockets of my jacket and that I couldn't get them out of there. Falling headfirst, struggling to free my hands from my pockets.

I landed on the stair with the elbow. After such a landing, your vision of the world totally change. You don't see your hands as just a stuff to grab other stuff anymore. This is truly a mind blowing revelation. Do I have to tell you about how many people witnessed this and asked me if I was OK?

Shit, are you still reading this? Don't you have something better to do? Anyway, I couldn't fully stretch my right arm for 2 days.

The El

Broadway, Brooklyn -- Hiver 2005

Everybody was kung fu fighting!

Tonight went to watch this. J. was supposed to be there too but I fucked up and arrived late. He had his ticket but assumed he wouldn't make it through the security because I was the one with all the information. He left to meet his girlfriend instead.

The movie was great. While watching I had hoped that J. was somewhere in the audience. It's only after the movie I managed to get in touch with him and learned what happened. I feel all shitty about it.

Anyway, check out the trailer here.