We're the ones who tell you what to do
Five minutes away from taking my summer vacation a couple of years back, I heard my boss’s voice booming from somewhere uncomfortably close by. “Good Lord,” I thought, “Is she following me or something?” But it turned out to be nothing of the kind. Instead, she was warning passengers that we should observe non-smoking areas and not leave our luggage unattended: It was my boss’s voice in a prerecorded message. Then I thought to myself, “So that means she does work on the side, too!”Heading to my gate, I passed a fast-food restaurant. Bored kids and other stray passengers gathered around a widescreen TV, which featured a dancing cartoon hamburger and talking french fries. “Waka waka waka!” cried the hamburger in my good friend John D’s voice. “Oui-ka Oui-ka Oui-ka” retorted the pomme de terre, which sounded suspiciously like one of my other colleagues doing a sorry French accent. “So they do it on the side, too!” I gasped, wondering just how many of my colleagues’ voices were also gainfully employed.
My charter flight to warmer climes featured one of those cheesy in-flight promo videos. This one was especially excruciating to sit through because I had to endure 20 minutes of my own voice. “Well tell us about those Mallorcans, George!” my voice gushed over scenes of nubile teens and golden beaches. I can’t remember doing anything like that, I thought, scrunching down into my seat. When the stewardess came around with the beverage cart, I thought it best to indicate my choice by pointing.
Germany is a great place to get voice-over work. It is the land of subtitles and honey, so to speak. This is not only owing to the native’s desire to dub Hollywood blockbusters and old Married with Children and Who’s the Boss? reruns badly into German, it also is because they enjoy dubbing already-dubbed films and TV shows back into English as well. Almost anything you can think of must be recorded in both German and English as a matter of course: training CD-ROMS for Siemens and BMW; Internet characters and video games; haircare product commercials and English instructional tapes for kindergartners.
As ace radio reporters for the Voice of Germany in Cologne (Deutsche Welle headquarters)—a building with 30 floors and hundreds of employees speaking 34 major world languages—my colleagues and I were sitting targets for desperate big- and small-time producers who frantically sought anybody to lend their native English voices to various last-minute productions. We made them pay. Okay, maybe not as much as James Earl Jones earned for doing those three words for Ted Turner—“THIS IS CNN!”—but synchronization, dubbing and voiceover work is a lucrative enough profession that many choose to give up their existing day jobs to do it full time.
One of the best jobs I’ve ever had was providing the American female voice for the “Offroad Navigation Onboard System” found in Range Rovers. My friend John did the American male voice. We had a blast saying things like, “turn right, head North by Northeast, you have arrived at your destination point.” “Okay, so why can’t we say it in a sexy voice now?” I asked the producer, who produced CDs of Bible stories for children and didn’t appear to be amused. “You have arrived (gasp, gasp) at your DES-ti-NA-tion point, baby!” I oozed. John and I thought the driver should have a choice of American characters, just to remind him of home, so we goofed around doing Gilligan and Maryann and I was also pretty good at imitating a nagging wife. “You always get lost George, why don’t you just give up?” Voice jobs aren’t just well paid for relatively easy work. They’re fun and the producers usually feed us, too.
I once got an offer to dub a pornographic film into English. If you can forget about why anybody would even need to do a porno film in more than one language, then the next concern when considering this kind of job would be whether or not it could hurt your career in the future. “I wouldn’t do it,” my mom warned me when I asked her advice. “What if you run for President someday and your opponent digs this thing up?” Though I have no plans to start a career in politics, I decided they couldn’t pay me enough to dub porn.
Even though I don’t see my pals back in Cologne as often as I’d like to, they’re still all around me in a veritable soundscape of unexpected but joyful “reunions”—on buses, in train stations, online. I still do the occasional voice job when I can and I am still hoping for that elusive big break that will allow me to retire early. I would love to be that lady in your dashboard who you just can’t get away from. “Door ajar.” Beep, Beep. “Door ajar.” Beep, Beep. “Door ajar.”
