Recently, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer said that “great stories can come from anywhere.”
Why? Because creativity exists everywhere. It’s something that’s inherently human. It comes – arguably perhaps – from a very human desire to be noticed by fellow humans. From the very beginning, humans created to be seen. They scratched pictures of animals on cave walls and sang to their fellow hunter-gatherers around the first fires that were ever kindled.
So, yes. Great stories can come from anywhere. I’m tempted to add, “and they go everywhere.”
At this year’s Languages and the Media conference in Budapest, I had the great pleasure to chair a panel composed entirely of dubbing scriptwriters. They, together with their colleagues in the dubbing industry, exist everywhere that great stories travel from one place to another.
To pour one’s creativity into becoming invisible – few people can imagine what that’s like, or even that this would be a desirable way to spend one’s life. But as dubbing scriptwriters, we think that being invisible is the best thing in the world.
And if we didn’t like it so much, if we weren’t there, audiences would sit on the sofa with a dictionary while watching a show.
We dubbing scriptwriters don’t just add value to a product by making it travel around the world. We literally create joy. And we create that joy by disappearing. We are that strange subcategory of creative that does NOT want to be seen. And neither do we want our work to draw any attention to itself. Unlike musicians, painters, novelists, who have something they want to show the world, our creativity remains entirely in the service of the story that someone wants to tell.
Only a couple of hours before our panel, Adam Salkeld, keynote speaker at Languages and the Media 24, spoke about duty of care, and he spoke about empathy – incidentally, the core quality that every translator and every dubbing scriptwriter must have. The other core quality, however, is respect. Respect for the original creators, whose stories (and often also hearts, souls, lives) we hold in our hands. It’s this respect that motivates us to be as invisible as we possibly can while allowing those stories, that can come from anywhere, to travel. Everywhere.
