Foreign Voices

Korea is well known for being a country where animation is outsourced from overseas. Did you know that Korea creates a lot of its own content which also relies on the work of foreigners?Meet Mina and Valerie. Mina (on the left) is from the United States. Valerie (on the right) hails from Canada. Both young women are English teachers in Korea, a common job for foreigners here. They are performers at heart and have found a way to put their skills to work.They are coached by their agent (on the left) who recruited them. The recording is directed by former teen pop singer TJ (in the middle) and assisted by MJ (way in the back).
Their job is no easy task. These young woman have to sing songs originally written in Korean that were translated into English. Reworking these Korean songs into natural sounding English versions required lots of tweaking. For instance, the songs made use of onomatopoeia devices found in the Korean language that simply do not exist in English. Gegul is the sound of rolling in Korean, but in English that sound doesn't exist. So they have to just sing rolling, rolling, rolling instead. They had to repeat songs over and over until they got it just right.Besides singing their hearts out, they also get to lend their voices to a cute baby boy (Mina) and a young sweet girl (Valerie).


Boom Chiki Boom! is the preschool program they work on. It's a program full of dancing and exercize. A unique feature of the show is that there is both a live-action puppet version and a 3D computer generated version. If you look closely on the monitor, you can see my favorite character from the puppet version.
Here's a blurry close up of that mischievous green thing. Through voice acting, Mina and Valerie are allowing Boom Chiki Boom! to possibly gain a wider audience than it would in Korean alone. And there are more such foreign voice actors as well. The world of animation and entertainment is full of work between people of many different nationalities. This day in the recording studio is just a very small slice of that.