The Linguist

10 The Linguist Vol/60 No/2 2021 thelinguist.uberflip.com FEATURES From audio translation to scratch narration, how can podcasts be brought to a global audience, asks Theo Merz M ore people are listening to and making podcasts than ever before. BBC Sounds, the British national broadcaster's radio and music app, reported around half a billion podcast plays in 2020; globally, there are some 1.7 million podcasts offering discussions and reports on topics ranging from true crime to ceramics, space travel, sex, gardening, left-wing literary analysis and right-wing conspiracy theories. While many of those podcasts are made by professional audio journalists and producers, a large number are put together by enthusiasts who are new to media production. In some ways, the process is simple: all you need is a microphone, the most basic editing software and the right pitch to reach a potential audience of millions. Yet the medium poses unique challenges. One of these is linguistic. How do you translate within a podcast? If your podcast features an interviewee, or follows a character, who doesn't speak the language of the intended audience, how do you get their voice across? While books can be translated and films can be subtitled, dubbing is a clumsy and often alienating method of relating what a foreign-language speaker is saying, especially over long stretches of audio. There is a danger of losing precisely what makes the medium so appealing: an intimate, authentic connection between the speaker and the audience. This is a problem I found myself grappling with last year when I set about making my first podcast. It was to be a reported story for an episode of the series On Spec, an independent, global project that has featured dispatches from journalists in Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere. For its second series, On Spec would focus on fake news and how this affects the lives of people across the globe. My task was to explore how disinformation peddled by the Russian state media about gay and trans people impacts the country's LGBTQ+ community. I had been living in Moscow for the past three years, working as a print journalist; I spoke Russian and had contacts in the LGBTQ+ community. For a newspaper or magazine article, the story would have been relatively straightforward to put together. I could have found subjects willing to go on the record and, as I usually did, interview them in their native language rather than English (in the hope that they would be more at ease and more able to speak their mind). For a podcast, things would have to be different. The producers wanted a 15-minute report featuring interviews with those peddling the propaganda as well as those affected by it, followed by a 15-minute discussion between two people on different sides of the "information divide" (i.e. a state- media-watching homophobe and a queer person). A 30-minute podcast featuring little but dubbed Russian speakers would be hard on the ear. But could I find two suitable interviewees who were willing to go on record and spoke fluent enough English to engage in a meaningful debate? And if not, could I find another way around the language barrier? Reaching a diverse audience For advice I turned to Katy Lee, the British, Paris-based host of an award-winning podcast called The Europeans. She and her co-host Dominic Kraemer launched the project in 2017 with the aim of bringing untold stories from around the continent to an English-language audience. Since then, they have had plenty of time to reflect on the difficulties of audio translation. "When we were first setting out, for the first couple of years at least, we relied on Europeans being able to speak English," Katy said, explaining that the costs of hiring translators and voiceover actors would have been prohibitive for a new podcast. "That was something we felt quite uncomfortable about because it meant we had to speak to Europeans largely from a well-educated background – fairly privileged Europeans, basically. We want to be a podcast that represents all walks of life and that is quite difficult when you have this linguistic issue." In time, funding came that allowed for translation, but the basic problem of how to do this remained. "There are two main ways of dealing with audio in different languages. The first is sometimes called 'scratch narration', where you paraphrase. You have a bit of the original audio and then you dip the volume down, the narrator or the journalist explains what they are saying. The other option is that you dub." The Europeans has largely relied on dubbing, though it has used some other work- Podcast voices "If this was TV, we could subtitle it and it would be much easier… a combination is the liveliest way"

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