By Maya Meinert
Special to the Daily Press

Most people give scant thought to those working behind the scenes on movies, commercials or television shows. And probably even fewer spend time pondering who ensured the subtitles in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” read true.

But without translators, the cultural divide between nations would continue to fester in the world of entertainment — by all accounts, one arena that brings us just a little bit closer.

Sunset Park resident Nanette Gobel, 36, has worked as a translator on television commercials, coached actors on ABC’s “Alias,” and lent her skills to the sets of such films as “Mission: Impossible III” and “Munich.” Her work includes dialect coaching, translating (written word), interpreting (spoken word) and various production projects, such as adapting movie scripts.

According to the American Translators Association (ATA), interpreters not only need to speak a language fluently, they must contain a wealth of knowledge about the culture.

Gobel, who has lived in Santa Monica for the past three years, received her master’s degree in media communication and modern languages through a joint program by Freie Universitaet Berlin (Free University of Berlin) and the Sorbonne in Paris.

“I lived in L.A. before, mostly in the Hollywood and Silver Lake area, which I liked, but then we moved over here because we started a family,” Gobel said. “I don’t know why we didn’t do it earlier, because this is the best place. It’s close to the ocean, and it’s great for raising a family.”

She and her husband, Erich, have a four-year-old daughter, making it increasingly difficult to get out to see the movies she enjoys so much, even those she has worked on.

Gobel sat down with the Daily Press to discuss working as a translator and dialect coach.

How did you become interested in translation and interpretation?

“I feel like I’ve been doing it my whole life because I grew up speaking different languages. I’ve always had a love and interest for languages, and skill for it too. I was also interested in the performing arts. When I was at the Sorbonne, things started coming together, where I could see where I could go with this. I met Atom Egoyan, the director of “The Sweet Hereafter” and an Armenian Canadian director, when I was volunteering for this cultural exchange association that was working on cultural programs throughout Europe. They had sent me a young German director, a film student, from Berlin who was going to meet Egoyan in Paris. The filmmaker from Germany wasn’t so sure of his English, so he asked me to come along for the interview because he had a script, and he was trying to see if Egoyan was interested and would help him with it.

“That was my first real encounter with a filmmaker, and I really got into filmmaking, because growing up, that wasn’t really something I thought you could get into, not like in L.A. Then, I started meeting more people in the industry. That’s when it started coming together. When I came to Los Angeles, I volunteered at USC to work with film students for a few months to really learn what production is all about. That was a great time, and that really set me up in a lot of ways. I’m always happiest when I’m working on something to do with languages and different cultures.”

What do you do with Disney?

“I work a lot for the theme parks. When they opened up the park in Paris, the new section dedicated to film, they had a lot of new attractions. They had a lot of celebrities involved with it, and obviously, it was in Paris, so they needed everything in different languages because they produced everything here [in America]. So I started working with the scripts, the actors, the directors and editing for the shows there and the attractions. I’ve also been doing stuff for Disney Florida, and sometimes for the parks here. A lot of my contacts are with Walt Disney, usually in production, because a lot of it is filmed, recorded or put together here.”

Do you do voiceover work?

“I sometimes do voiceover work. If I’m not involved in the casting, and no other linguist is involved, which does happen, and an actor is cast who actually doesn’t speak the language, I come in to coach. Sometimes you can’t really fix it. Then they’ll just send me in the booth and have me record it. But usually, I’m on the other side of the booth. Usually, I’m sitting behind the console with the director and the writer.”

It sounds like a lot of your work is consulting-oriented.

“It is kind of consulting-oriented to a certain degree. Even though there is a lot of work involved where you sit there with the text and you have to come up with an adaptation, to make sure it comes across not only language-wise, but also culturally. For example, you can’t just always translate a joke word by word. If you try to make a joke about a jellyfish made of peanut butter and jelly, you’re not going to make that joke in any other language. And if it’s [a legal issue], then you have to get it right. You can get sued.”

What’s the difference between being bilingual or fluent in a language and being able to accurately translate something?

“At first, for a few years, I worked on the production side of things with French producers or German companies. But at some point, I realized what I really loved about it was what I could bring back to the table, so that’s when I got certified by the ATA to make sure that I was industry standard, even though I had been doing it beforehand. I hadn’t been calling myself a translator until I got my certification from the ATA. I took the test right away to make sure I knew what I was doing, and I did. That’s when I started working with the studios. I worked with a French producer, like I said, and with a French director who was working with a German client, which was very interesting because you really had all three angles involved in it. I worked with Julie Delpy, and then that just opened up other things. People started calling me for other things that were not only production-related, but were overall entertainment related.

“Sometimes you don’t even really know what you’re working on. People are very secretive in the entertainment industry. One time, I got a script I was supposed to adapt into German, and they said it was an independent film. I think they even tried to tell me it was a student film, but I knew it probably wasn’t because it was scene 55 and there was sophisticated dialogue. I had to also provide the phonetics, so I knew they were going to record it. And they didn’t want anyone on set. They just wanted me to prep the whole thing, and so I did and then forgot about it. Then six to eight months later, I’m at the movies, and it was a big movie that won a lot of awards with a big director. Halfway through the movie, the scene comes on, and I’m thinking, ‘Gosh, this sounds really familiar. Why do I know this?’ and it was that scene. So sometimes you work with famous people, and you don’t even know it.”

What is an example of something you would do?

“‘Alias’ is a good example, because I actually prepped the script. I got the English script and made it work in German for the scene, and then I recorded it for the actor. Ironically though, they originally wanted a Hebrew actor, and then they changed it at the last minute to German, but they didn’t recast. So I was working with an actor who spoke Hebrew to do the scene in German. Also, I worked with one of the regulars on ‘Alias,’ who was American, but had a German mother, so his German was actually very good. But I had two hours to work with him, and in two hours I couldn’t get rid of his accent. So then we just worked on different things because one of the things he wanted to do was pronounce correctly. But when you try to pronounce something, you start moving your mouth a lot. You can’t do that in front of a camera when you’re supposedly speaking a language that you’re comfortable with. So you get into more details of character and mentality. That would be one example of when I do dialect coaching.

“I also sometimes do the exact opposite. They’ll hire an actor who is fluent and who is a native in that language, but sometimes it’s hard for production companies to tell if that person is actually a native or not if you don’t speak it. And then I’m working a lot more with the director to figure out if the lines are being delivered the way they want it, where they could smile or where they shouldn’t smile. Because maybe you would make a really happy face if you delivered that in America, but maybe you wouldn’t make such a happy face if you delivered it in German or French. That’s always a big thing.”



Is there a language or culture that is harder to translate into American English than others, in your experience?

“It depends. Linguistically, French is closer to English than German. With German, you have to restructure it. The interesting thing is the little differences between here and Europe, like John Travolta says in the opening of ‘Pulp Fiction.’ It makes it interesting.

“In French, you have to pay a lot of attention to the details and to the tone. I always have someone else that I’m working with because you have to be so careful. People tend to be most unhappy with things French. There’s a certain particularity on both sides.”

Do you think there is room for improvement in the industry as a whole?

“From my work, I can tell that people are getting a lot more interested and sensitive to it. They tend to hire a lot more people from the language industry to make sure they get it right. Every now and then when I see a movie, I think they wouldn’t have done that a few years ago. For example, before they wouldn’t have done ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ in Spanish. Or movies that deal with cultural differences, like ‘Crash’ or ‘Lost in Translation.’ It’s great to be able to help in that process, to make sure people get it right. There’s a mindset that I think is opening up right now.”