MONTREAL — The lights have been dimmed in a sixth-floor dubbing studio just west of Old Montreal. Claudia Laurie stands at a microphone, syncing her lines to the video silently playing on the screen a few feet in front of her. The actress is playing an army nurse in Afghanistan.
Phoneticized text scrolls above the scene. A red pilot light goes on when it’s Laurie’s turn to speak. “Il y a une chose dont je tenais à te parler,” the nurse announces to a doctor friend, with whom, apparently, she’s having an affair. “J’ai l’intention de reprendre mes études.”
To Laurie’s side, voice director Julie Burroughs sits at a table with the script. Occasionally, she feeds the actress a suggestion: speed up, slow down, speak more softly, change the accent, give it more punch. A technician in the booth behind them keeps the playback coming.
On screen, the characters are arguing. The doctor complains he has let himself get too distracted lately — “me laisser distraire” — by their secret affair. “Distraire?” replies the nurse, feigning insult. “Je te jure,” she adds flirtatiously, “je crois que t’a réussi à explorer chacune de mes coutumes.”
Afraid of being overheard, the doctor tells her to keep her voice down.
“O, mon Dieuuu!” the nurse replies, exasperated. Laurie stretches her intonation to match the “Oh, my gawwwd!” of the original. “Non, mais t’es serieux? T’a peur de te faire prendre à cause d’une mé-ta-phorrre?”
End of scene.
Other actors will come and go during the day here at Audio Postproduction SPR Inc., as dubbing continues for another episode of Combat Hospital, a TV drama series about Canadian and other international military medical staff in war-torn Afghanistan. Shot in Toronto, the series aired on Global and ABC in the summer of 2011 before being cancelled. Now Radio-Canada has picked up the series for Quebec, and the job of adapting it into French has come here, to SPR.
It’s not the only job this Tuesday afternoon.
In a studio across the hall, a separate dubbing session is in progress for something completely different — for kids. It’s Franklin and Friends, the Canadian TV animation series that airs on Treehouse and Nickelodeon. The series is based on the popular Franklin the Turtle books by Paulette Bourgeois and Brenda Clark. In Quebec, the title character goes by the name Benjamin. In France, he’s still Franklin, but pronounced the French way: Frunk-laen.
Today, for the episode called Franklin Makes Some Noise, actress Annie Girard is voicing Goose and Éloisa Cervantes incarnates Snail. Their high-pitched kiddie voices ring through the studio.
“J’adore jouer à cache-cache — ooo-wee!” cries one. “Bon, c’est moi qui compte — allez vous cacher!” commands the other. “Un, deux, trois, quaaatre, ciiiiinq, siiix, sept, huit, neuf, dix — j’ai fini de compter!”
And they do it again a couple of times to get it right.
Dubbing is a precise craft and Quebec is a unique market. Able to draw on a wealth of bilingual talent, dubbing firms here are at the centre of the trade in Canada.
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Quebec’s $20-million dubbing industry squeezed by lagging economy, cheaper competition
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