My New Best Friend

Both yesterday and today, the Advertising department here at PHC (check out our new website) has been roaming the hallways with video cameras, microphones, and greenscreens, creating our big promotional video for the NASCC show in Nashville. The NASCC is the biggest show in our industry, and we’re throwing a grand dinner for over 300 of our best clients at the end of the show (which will, rumor has it, include a surprise concert appearance by a well-known personality). The video will be shown at the dinner as a “thank you” to our clients for keeping us in business.

A few days ago, the head of Advertising approached me about appearing in the video. While my academic credentials may not seem like much to my engineering counterparts, they seem to imbue me with a variety of talents to be exploited by the other departments. Lately, it appears that my Masters degree gives me the power to speak any Western language, alive or dead, and thus I was asked to prepare a small paragraph thanking our customers, translate it into French, and speak it in front of a greenscreen. I begged to shorten the message, and then began to work on it.

During the weekend, I cast about for assistance, but found none. I did my best to translate the words, but since I’ve never spoken more than about ten words in French up until this point in my life, I couldn’t be sure of their accuracy and my pronunciation. Thankfully, about 15 minutes before I had to perform for the camera today, I stumbled across this site, which seemed to translate my words more accurately than I could myself. And the best part about this site is the translator’s link to another site that produces life-like audio readings of your translation. A very cool website pairing, in my mind, and one that I will probably be using frequently in the future. Click here to hear what I finally said on the video (although I actually pronounced the company name correctly).