Scríobhann Ciara Pollock, Dubbing Manager in Macalla Teoranta, an Irish production company who have brought Spongebob Squarepants as Gaeilge to the masses, about the work involved in translating a much loved character.
I've been working in television for almost a decade now, and I find the easiest way to describe what I do, no matter who asks, is always "Spongebob as Gaeilge".
For me, Spongebob agus Gaeilge have always been intrinsically tied. I still have vivid memories of sitting in my Granny’s house after school with my sisters watching Spongebob on TG4, completely engrossed. We never heard him speak a word of English until much later in life, but through TG4 he was teaching us words like 'smugairle róin’ (jellyfish) and exclamations of ‘i ndáiríre!?’ (seriously!?). Now, 20-something years later, I find myself working on the exact same dub, with a lot of the original cast and crew.
There are a lot of misconceptions about access to the Irish language. I grew up in a working-class, DEIS area in rural Leitrim. Gaelscoileanna and Gaelcholáistí (Irish-language medium schools, primary and secondary respectively) were not an option for me; neither were summers in the Gaeltacht. No one on either side of my family speaks Irish. Yet I loved the language from a very young age, because of the likes of TG4 and their array of dubbed cartoons. I pursued that love all the way to college, where I studied Journalism and Irish in DIT; after which I started with Macalla, where I’ve now been for almost 9 years.
There’s a lot of steps involved in producing and creating a dub. I love starting something new, watching a show for the first time, and noting everything that comes to mind - whether it’s catchphrases and names to be translated (and how), or my favourite part, casting - who could voice whom? Where do we want to go, in terms of canúintí (regional dialects), who will voice this particular family or group of friends, etc. We like to have a strong Dublin influence in our shows too, being the only dubbing studio based here.
I love taking an already constructed world, like Bikini Bottom in Spongebob, or the Land of Ooo in Adventure Time, and adapting it to an Irish context - not just through language, but with cultural references and jokes that may sometimes only make sense to an Irish audience. To me, that is essentially what localisation is all about. A reference to a beauty pageant becomes a nod to Rós Thrá Lí, a speech about George Washington turns into Pádraig Mac Piarais in 1916, a joke about Albert Einstein’s moustache becomes Marty Whelan’s.
One of the challenges in dubbing is that we work in reverse. When creating an original animation, voices are usually recorded first, and then the animators work with what’s recorded to create the episodes. In dubbing, we do the opposite - we must work to fit the on-screen lipsync of the original show, which can be challenging when on average, Irish translations are 30% longer than their original English versions. We have a crew of talented scríbhneoirí across the country who translate scripts with all of this in mind, which we then edit. We create a vocabulary bank, or a foclóir sraithe, for each series that we can always reference: character names, locations, catchphrases, song lyrics, etc.
Casting is great fun - we have a fantastic group of passionate actors from every corner of Ireland. We work closely together on finding each voice, whether it’s for a recurring main character, or one of the many iconic background fish seen in Spongebob. Depending on the project, we can take inspiration from what’s already there, or voices we hear in the world around us. Once casting is complete, we hit the studio - director, sound engineer, and actor, and start re-creating this new world presented to us, now entirely as Gaeilge.
Not only do we bring these cartoons into homes and classrooms across Ireland, we like to bring them to the global audience online. I get a kick out of playing around with our dubbed scenes on Tiktok, making memes and seeing what sticks. It’s such a joy getting comments from people of all ages, all over the world, telling us about how they watch these shows to learn the language. It’s something that’s so accessible, and yet so silly and fun.
So as a lifelong "Spongebob as Gaeilge" fan, it’s really special to get to work on the movies with TG4 and Paramount. ‘Spongebob an Scannán: Cá Bhfuil Squarepants?’ is the fourth Spongebob movie Macalla have worked on. My first time directing a Spongebob movie dub was on the third film of the franchise, ‘Rith, Spúinse, Rith!’ which happened mid-pandemic, and largely over Zoom calls from my childhood bedroom in Leitrim: a weird, full circle moment.
It’s funny, I never saw myself working in TV and film, and yet when I think back to my eight year old self, giggling along with Spongebob on TG4 on Granny’s wee kitchen telly, I can’t help but think I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.
Eolas anseo faoi cén áit ar féidir leat an scannán a fheiceáil.
Information on where to watch the film here
