My infirmities have forced me to spend a lot of time in front of Armenian TV in the last few days and so I can report in detail on the schedule of the network channels.  There are prime time Hayastan versions of The Doctors ( the Phil McGraw format), Full House, and the Jeremy Kyle/Jerry Springer show. These are no more edifying here than in your homeland, but are of course cheap to produce in bulk and easy to repeat. This being Hayastan,  problems on the talk show are perhaps less scandalous than they would be in the US or the UK: “My wife doesn’t always provide a full, hot dinner at 5:30pm. How can I get through another 50 years of marriage?”  “Everyone else’s husband spends most of the year working in Russia. Why does my husband lie around at home?” “My daughter wants to go to college. I would prefer her to live at home and marry the boy next door. Which of us is right?”  “Am I wrong to wax my six year old?”  

Then there are dubbed versions of Indian soap operas. The sets and costumes are high-colored and so are the plots. It doesn’t take a lot of acting talent for the voiceover artists to match the skills of the original actors, but the whole spectacle is hugely compelling.  We are on the edge of our seats as marriages break up, beautiful women cry, evil children concoct villainous plots, and good looking men pine for lost loves from miserable prison cells. Everything but the fabrics are terrible. We are all completely hooked. 

And then there are the Hollywood movies dubbed into Hayeren. I watched something in which Brad Pitt romped about in hopsack and a ridiculous hat. Whatever the failings of the movie, best I could tell, the voice stand-in was rather good. Then I saw Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs. Again, the vocal understudy was entirely convincing. The following day I watched some of a children’s film–really high quality but not familiar to me. It must have been Disney or Pixar though. The voiceover work was great– characterful and nuanced: great acting in Armenian. 
So who is providing these voices, and where?  This is a small country with 3 million people at most. How many of these are top quality actors able to stand in for all the Hollywood greats?  Who directs their performance behind the mic? 

Ah, you say, the work is done in Hollywood where the studios dub versions of their movies for distribution all around the world. Well, maybe. But even if these movies first had theatrical distribution here in Armenia, I fear that the budget for the Hay entertainment industry doesn’t stretch to Hollywood rates; plus I believe that most of the Armenian diaspora in Glendale CA speak West Armenian, not East Armenian as we do here. (The people who fled 100 years ago from land now claimed by Turkey spoke a language that moved with them to the States. We speak differently here and now). 

Curiosity drove me to the Disney website where they proudly record all the languages into which their films are dubbed. Armenian was not listed. The film I glimpsed may not have been Disney (it seemed to be a meld of Toy Story and Cars), and even if it was, perhaps the work was done without the express permission and involvement of the originating studio? If so, it was a marvel of mixing: there was both dubbed dialogue and background music/ effects.– difficult to do without a do-it-yourself voiceover track made available on the original film.   

Watching Armenian media has made me appreciate my luck in being accidentally born in a country that speaks one of the world’s most common languages: English. Those of us lucky enough to speak English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Russian or other key world languages have almost unlimited access to great storytelling: the stuff we generate, and the translations from other cultures keen to access our pounds, euros, dollars, rupees, rubles, and whatever they spend in China.  Armenians are not so lucky. No wonder so many of them work at learning three or four languages. It is not uncommon to find young people from small villages like mine who speak Hayeren, Russian, English, Spanish and perhaps also some French or German. Literacy in this country is at 96% and families and schools expect a great deal from their children. In a country where jobs are few and far between, language skills are both a passport and an employment guarantee. Brad Pitt and Ashton Kutcher are big deals in America but they wouldn’t be all that here in Armenia. Not unless they could do their own voiceover in half a dozen major markets. 

One of our program managers in Peace Corps is an Armenian with a PhD in English Literature. His dissertation discusses the role of the fools in the plays of William Shakespeare. Not only does he speak perfect English, he reads and analyzes Shakespeare in a language not his own. Stepan has not visited England and has yet to see a Fool on stage at the Globe or in Stratford on Avon. He spends his working life teaching (mainly) monolingual Americans like me how to fit in here in his homeland. Good job he knows what fools are for…