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.)

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.