The day began on Friday with a relaxed schedule due to
the fact the middle-schoolers were preparing for a sports day festival on
Saturday. Around noon I was presented with an opportunity from my boss to take
on a special project: recording English dubbs over a 30 minutes Japanese
television program on organic agriculture in Okinawa. The program was for some
reason going to be sent to Saudi Arabia and they needed a native English
speaker to read the translated script. I was excited to do this as I had no
work to do and it sounded like one of those random jobs you only stumble across
in Japan. (I mean really- SAUDI ARABIA?)
Well, things looked ominous from the beginning. I
waited for a half hour for the car to pick me up to take me to the recording
studio before I was told the woman bringing the translation had been in a car
accident, so I should take a cab to meet our contact at a café twenty minutes
away. My co-worker Alini came with
me to make sure that I was able to find the people I was supposed to make
contact with, the plan then being that she would leave once all was well. When
arrived, we met Tamagi san, a fifty-something retiree who supposedly made a
career in international media (I question the validity of this claim after
working with him, but I’ll get to that). We ended up chatting. And chatting.
And chatting. Topics of conversation were becoming desperate. Alini ended up
staying with me, hoping to leave once the translated text arrived. I was
grateful she was there because, while my Japanese usually gets my by, it was no
match for the garbled mess of words uttered in a dialect I like to refer to as
“man talk”. Tokyo, Okinawa, wherever, men have a horribly effected style of
speech that is nearly impossible to understand. From the complex to the most
basic sentences, even Alini at times had trouble understanding, and her first
language is Japanese.
Anyway. The hours ticked by. Finally at four thirty we
got a confession from the woman who had supposedly gotten in a car accident
that she never finished translating the document (Mary from Ireland, if our
paths ever cross you may want to walk in the opposite direction..). New plan.
Tamagi said I should still come to the studio and instead of reading a script I
should just wing it! Just watch the screen. Say what I see. So professional,
right? I couldn’t believe it. But, he said we would be done by seven and as it
was a favor to the Vice President, Alini and I felt that we had to go.
So, we hopped in a cab and start driving to the
studio. Again, so glad Alini was there because it was a scene straight out of a
horror film. The “studio” was a small wooden trailer in the middle of an
isolated and deserted sea port. Two young girls, one “powerful” media
executive, deserted trailer. Maybe you know how those movies end? Well, of
course I’m being dramatic. We were never in danger, but we realized the
absurdity of the situation in that moment. None of our bosses knew where we
were, what we were doing, who we were with, etc.
We arrived at the studio and find out that we ARE
indeed going to need to translate the script. Usually a difficult task in
itself, consider the fact we also had to use vocabulary such as fermentation,
micro-organic material, etc to describe “SION”, the featured product. It was a
very technical piece with many interviews, so it took a very long time to
translate. A VERY long time. As in, 5 hours. As in, Alini and I sitting there
for five hours while she translated from Japanese into simple English and I
polished the sentences. Five hours while Tamagi and his co worker sat there
without any real empathy or appreciation for what we were doing, only
flippantly chuckling while asking if we were okay on time (Of course Tamagi, at
nine o’clock on Friday night, there’s NOTHING else I’d rather be doing!)
Finally
at 10:00 pm I read from my very rough notes as we recorded the English over the
Japanese. It wasn’t the most professional job on my end, but then again there
was almost no professionalism to work with from the beginning, so I guess we
did the best we could. Tamagi then made pleasantries by taking friendly
pictures of Alini and I. He asked Alini her name for the 10th time.
More of the same. 11 pm Alini and I were dropped off at school, gave each other
a big hug and walked our separate ways.
In the end, all’s well that ends well. We will receive
payment for our work, we were apologized to by our bosses, so amends have been
made. But it was still pretty discouraging to see my employer let another
outside organization take such advantage of Alini and I. In the future I need
to be more protective of my time and skills when working with other outside
groups. But, on the other hand, I got to make a recording that will be
broadcast on Saudi Arabian television. Sometimes it’s worth suffering momentary
hardship for the sake of a great story. Only in Japan, right?
 |
| The amazing Alini and myself. 10:40 pm. |
No comments:
Post a Comment