Photo: newstaco.com
There are 342 million people in the world who live in places where the language that they speak is not the dominant language. That doesn’t prevent a person from participating in society, of course. But it does make going to the movies less fun.
That’s something that Olenka Polak–a 20-year-old Harvard dropout and co-founder, along with her brother Adam, of the app myLingo, is determined to fix.
“We came up with the idea for myLingo in the summer of 2012 after we took our cousins, who were visiting from Poland, to a movie near our house in Connecticut that, of course, was playing in English,” Polak recalls. “They came out of the theater, and they didn’t really like the movie. We were surprised–it was Hugo, and Hugo is awesome. But they complained about their movie-going experience, frustrated by the fact that they didn’t understand the context of the movie at all.”
Inspired by this, Polak and her brother set out to create an app that would allow anyone to watch a movie in any theater in the world in whatever language they preferred.
The way it works is actually fairly simple. Major studio pictures have language tracks that already play in theaters where appropriate: If you go see Captain America: The Winter Soldier in Paris, Cap and his friends are going to be speaking en francais. What myLingo does is allow anyone sitting in a theater to listen to that version of the language track on their headphones, by opening the app.
It’s a remarkable creation, fulfilling a simple need efficiently and elegantly by using technology that most moviegoers already have in their pocket. And Polak says that because of the technology they use, the experience is seamless.
“What’s coming through the headphones is exactly what’s coming through the speakers when the movie plays in, let’s say Mexico,” she says. “It’s the full surround-sound, dialogue, and FX tracks. There’s no a-synchrony that disturbs the experience, because the FX track of the English audio and that of the Spanish audio is exactly the same–and our technology perfectly synchronizes the two together, so as you’re hearing the explosion through the headphones, it’s the bass and the rumble of the theater that complements that in the earphones–because it’s the same sound.”
To read the full story: http://www.fastcocreate.com/3028311/movie-dubbing-app-mylingo-allows-families-with-language-barriers-to-see-cesar-chavez-togethe
For more information on the app: http://www.mylingoapp.com