Real People | Real Stories

Most of the formal education in Nepal takes place in English–this is true (we understand) whether students are in government schools or private schools. Nepali language study is the lone exception.

The Little Sisters Fund girls are all products of this system, and for the most part, the older ones particularly can communicate reasonably well in English. The language situation is in this regard about as we’d guessed before coming.

But in our planning, with this in mind, we had figured we would be able to elicit pretty meaningful interview responses in English, even from those who aren’t conversationally fluent.

After about a dozen short interview/on-camera responses, and a couple of longer ones, it has become clear to us that our subjects are just not comfortable enough speaking in English to give us any kind of emotion or inflection–other than that of fear about messing up the language test that they seem to consider an interview.

So we’re scrapping English, and planning to conduct our interviews in Nepali. Of course we will have the aid of Nutan, who even before she had ever done a minute’s interpretation/translation for interviewing had a great grasp of what it would entail.

As I write I’m in the ‘business center’ of our hotel and Amy and Nutan are upstairs working on our Mac, logging and figuring out a translation-in-editing protocol. It’s clearly going to be a labor intensive move, but the difference between the interviews in which girls spoke in English, and seeing them speak in Nepali… let’s just say the Nepali is going to win the day.

It was disappointing at first when we realized we’d have to do this. But then we realized how much fun it would be for either of us to be interviewed–and asked to give heartfelt, meaningful responses–in Spanish, or Arabic (languages we can both kind of communicate in). Yeee!

Okay, girls, we’ll give you this one. Helping the case for Nepali was “Living Goddess”, a documentary we saw as part of the South Asian Travelling Film Festival. It was a really interesting film, and the producers had both tremendous access with their key subjects and killer footage of the violence-in-the-streets of the political upheaval in Kathmandu in 2006.

But the point is that nobody in the film spoke in English, and we were still quite aware of what went on, how people felt, and even some nuance in the film.

Duh: Subtitles. It was a head-slapping moment. Of course they work. We just kind of needed convincing. Mostly, probably, to get over the part about how much more work it’ll be.