FEATURE
Joan Dans
President at Carasmatic Productions, Multilingual Voiceover Specialists
I originally fell into localization without realizing that was what I was doing. As a Japanese major at Harvard I was interested in modern feminist literature, which was bubbling up subversively around Japan but not yet accepted into the mainstream. For my honors thesis, I chose to translate the works of an overlooked female writer so others could feel her plight, but at our first meeting my thesis advisor shocked me by asking, “Why don’t you work on a real writer?” He meant a male.
That’s all it took to spur me on deeply in my quest to make the work of female authors (and later, songwriters) accessible to those who didn’t speak Japanese, and I continued with a masters degree on the aesthetics of Japanese-to-English literary translation. The intricacies of transmitting not only meaning, but art and sensibility, from one language to another — especially two such opposite languages as Japanese and English — fascinated me to no end.
ACCOLADES
Joan is one of the kindest and most empowering women I’ve ever met. I’ve known her since I was a little kid, and she helped me find my voice as an artist, and that is a gift and a superpower I take with me to this day. Joan is incredible and truly deserves this nomination more than anyone.
My career took me to Japan to work as a radio announcer and voiceover artist, as well as a writer for magazines. I translated radio scripts for luminaries such as Barry White and Gladys Knight to record in English, attempting to convey the Japanese producer’s vision into another language with a radically different aesthetic sensibility. At the Winter Olympics at Nagano, I recreated scripts for the announcers, of which I was one, so they would sound natural to an international audience.
Somehow, my work in voiceover and localization coalesced into a unique and exciting career, one which keeps evolving as technologies change and once-distant cultures become closer. After a decade as a voice talent in Japan, I founded Carasmatic Productions, a boutique multilingual voiceover production company, and regardless which of the 150 languages we work in, the issues are the same: How do you take the essence of what one entity wants to communicate and make that not only accurate but also beautiful in a completely unrelated language. Then, how do you convey that essence using the human voice so the target language listener is left with the same impression as a listener in the source language? For me, it’s not just about transmitting information, but rather about the feeling of connectedness and mutual understanding, and I am honored to be recognized among this group of women equally passionate about language and communication.
Fluent in Japanese and with skills in several other languages, Joan pivoted her career from being a voice talent herself (with international credits such as the Olympics and major car navigation systems) to producing voiceovers and translations in over 150 languages. … During the pandemic, though, was when she shone brightest, working individually with voice talents to upgrade their home studios and iron out the glitches to make remote recording easier and keep talents safe. She worked with Navajo speakers to ensure that critical Covid-related information was accessible to all in their communities.
Throughout the many years that I have collaborated with her, she has always proven herself to be a person of unimpeachable integrity. As far as I am concerned, this is the most essential quality that a leader should have.
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