German Voice-over at MCM Voices!

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I love languages and that I’ve been taking Spanish for a while with the goal of being able to offer voice-over in Spanish. The language I’ve studied the longest besides English, however, is actually German. I started taking it in 7th or 8th grade, continued through high school and college, and the last German course I took was when I was a university faculty member back in the not-even-gonna say when-ties! I audited a course at that time, since I was considering spending some time at the University of Vienna working with a colleague in developmental evolutionary biology and wanted to brush up (I ended up working at the National Science Foundation instead). Because I started relatively young, my accent is close to perfect. I could get along just fine if you dropped me off in a Spanish-speaking country, but my German still sounds better than my Spanish right now. Still, I expected to be offering Spanish voice-over in the near future, not German. Last month, a German narration job dropped into my lap.

Okay, I actually moved my lap so that the job would fall in the right place. My friend Liz de Nesnera, who does voice-over in English and French, has a client who was looking for native German voice talent. I told her that if her client was desperate she could let him know that my German was very good. Apparently, he was, because he hired me. Not only that, he made the same mistake a few weeks later, and it looks like I’ll be working with him on a regular basis. I am really quite thrilled. It was a little scary at first, but I’m here to tell you, it is very good for us to stretch our wings and get out of the place where we’re comfortable.

So, it is back to school again for me. I took a one-week course in medical Spanish during interterm at the local college, and now am in Contemporary Culture (in Spanish) AND “high intermediate” German. I’ve survived the first week unscathed and am in linguistic heaven.

A link to a snippet of that first German narration job is here.