Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 101 JF: For Foley spotting, we started noticing there was a lot of literal description of what was happening on screen instead of notes on emphasis and performance. We figured something was being lost in the translation. Our big breakthrough came with weekly video conferences where we could dive deeper in real time with the KJP team. We started working with translators who themselves were sound designers and music designers, so they were able to listen to the spotting notes in real time and translate the importance of certain key details. It took us a bit, but we realized over time that when our teammates were describing the beats in the scene, it wasn't necessarily just rote transcription. It was more that they wanted to hear the footsteps as they traverse. They wanted to hear the object that was described. That was a huge breakthrough for us for sure. For SIE, it's the technology and the people. I remember I would go over and chat with bilingual sound designer Kei Matsuo MPSE and ask if I worded things correctly. We would literally take it and put it through the translation both ways, multiple times, until we refined exactly the message we wanted to say. That was always a fun little challenge. DE: You just reminded me that one of the problems is not only a difficulty understanding the exact meaning of words, but also tradition and the Japanese way of thinking about cinema, about games and about entertainment. For example, the Red Samurai that we see in the game carries with him a lot of tropes of Japanese TV samurai dramas. When he pulls his sword out, when he puts his sword back in, there's a distinct double click, which is for the people who grew up with those dramas, the classic sound cue of the samurai. That took a while to get. We'd often have to go back and ask them, "Please give us a YouTube link of exactly what you're talking about." It's not just decoding one-to-one ideas. It's a complete culture, a rich culture with its own way of seeing the world that had to be conveyed. AB: There is the nuance of the Japanese language, which can make it tough to translate certain words or terms between English and Japanese. There's also the technical language that we have for sound, music, and dialogue work. What is a track? What is a session? What is an aux send? Some of these words alone can have different meanings in English. We'd use terms like these in the meetings. All props to the translation team—they did a great job, and they're doing live translation back and forth in the meetings which is an amazing skill, but there were a few times early on where we'd have to take time to explain some of the jargon we were using that we use every day, and what it does so that they can be sure that they're able to properly convey it to the KJP team or vice versa. In the end, it was all great stuff, but it's a tough job translating between our teams! AP: The translation staff did an amazing job at taking extra time to have a deeper understanding of a lot of the terminology we would use. Eventually, they began to understand the actual technical workflow behind everything, and it made their ability to interpret things a lot better as things went on. We eventually started to provide technical documentation ahead of time so that they could go over it beforehand. In this regard, I think sound design is pretty unique in what we do and how we go about it. The translators did an excellent job of trying to understand everything about all of our jobs. So it was really helpful. EM: The sound and music work for this game has gone on to win a number of awards, and deservedly so. If there were one piece of advice you all could offer to an aspiring game audio or music person who's just beginning their career right now, what Higgs (portrayed by Troy Baker)