Nutan and Amy hard at work on the subtitles. Did I mention it was hard work?

So, in parts of the world that aren’t North America, they have this game called soccer. Actually they call it football, but when you’re an American and not talking about the NFL kind, you always need to say that first bit.

Football has been throwing itself a party in Europe here in the last month, and since Nepal is situated several time zones away from that continent, matches are broadcast late at night. Quite natural and fair enough, right?

Right.

Except that all of our tapes are in the hands of a rabid soccer football fan–our transcriber–whose day job work schedule is also being violently disrupted by the strikes and make-up days and various other crises that’ve been entertaining us here of late. Poor guy’s being pulled in three ways:

Career (his teaching job) | Money (our transcription job) | Love (the Euro Cup)

So basically our moonlighting language helper is too tired to put in the kind of lunatic all-nighter schedule we take for granted. All because of the soccer freaks in Europe and their poncy Euro Cup or whatever it’s called.

Just kidding, those guys are total jocks, etc. Thank god it’s over.

We’re seriously down to the wire on getting all our stuff translated/subtitled before we leave, which as I type is in two days’ time.

Yipe!

As far as we can tell, it’s working. We’re staring down several long days of hard, hard work, but when we leave here (touch a bit of wood) we should have something we’ve never had before: a puzzle in which the sizes and shapes of the pieces are already defined before we sit down to Final Cut it.

Room service.

Tea. Biscuits.

Beer.

Little boxes of “Real” (brand) mango nectar.

Many trips up and down the stairs carrying papers and notebooks…

It’s feeling a little like finals week at the dorms.

Amy and Nutan are hammering out a great system for getting each subtitle screen to correspond to a discrete clip (which also somewhat miraculously says what’s written there). I’m here to tell you, next time you watch a subtitled film, don’t misunderestimate the effort that goes into it.

That said, it’s also a very rewarding process, in that we get to spend some real time with the best bits of the film we’ve shot. Sense how they feel and sound. And look. Same with looking at complete transcripts–We keep this stuff swirling in our heads in a way you don’t do if you just shoot a tape, and then put it in the stack like we used to do.

(Good thing I took the trouble to go to journalism school. Not like they didn’t tell me that there about three times a week for two years. Ah, well…sometimes you gotta learn a thing a few different ways.)