Earlier this year, I attended an event with this title, curated by my friend Charlotte Bosseaux, within Edinburgh University.

It opened up to me a previously unconsidered world of interpreting, translating and dubbing: the power of interpreters and translators in altering the meaning of the original; the deep challenges to honestly wanting to move something from one language with its culture, into another; and the complexity of dubbing film and TV (including how many actors play George Clooney’s voice?).

Whose voice is it anyway? becomes a great personal question to ask about the authenticity of our own voice in the world.

Is this really my voice?  
Do I know who I am and what is my voice?  
Or am I speaking with someone else’s voice?  
The voice of a parent, a partner, an employer, a child, a friend, a public, a culture, a society?  

Life isn’t about dubbing someone’s life with a voice we think is more them (Charlotte provides the example of Tom Selleck in Magnum PI, who has quite a high voice for someone with his appearance, so the German version uses an actor with a deeper voice, considered a better fit for Selleck – though, in real life this would mean inauthenticity).*

We may have the best intentions for encouraging people to be this or that, whilst a person may feel others must know them better than they know themselves, so they comply, but beauty comes from being who we really are, knowing our voice, and sharing it with the world.

We should all be encouragers of this:

“If your actions lead people to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.”**

No matter how much care those around take ing advising you about how you should “sound” – the feel and intonation and pitch of your voice – the only person who really knows your true voice is you.

(*Charlotte Bosseux’s Dubbing, Film and Performance.)
(**John Quincy Adams, quoted in Tom Asackacker’s The Business of Belief.)