The script stared back at me. Two documents, filled with it, both of them my ticket to having something prepared for the first concert at CTN this weekend. It's being called a "soft launch", but let's be honest with each other here: the GM will be watching and if it's a disaster, shit's gonna hit the fan.
It's not going to be a disaster, mostly because I refuse to let it be. I'm young and inexperienced, sure, and I am totally out of my league here, working in a foreign company, language, and medium (TV), but I am very good at what I do, and part of that is understanding what I need to make it happen.
It involves, by the way, a lot of texting and calling and following up and bothering people and starting conversations with, "I don't know if you are the right person to help me, but-", and persistance.
Like the seven hours I spent on Wednesday wrestling with those documents, covered in script.
Clearly, I decided, I need to learn to read Khmer. I learned the alphabet at some point but never memorized it, and reading is different from recognizing symbols. But for the moment, I thought, I'll just copy and paste this into youtube and see what happens.
This is what happened:
´ecHemIlEfnagehIy
Un-copy-paste-able. Right, so before I learn to read, I'm going to need to learn to type, that doesn't require understanding. Off I went to activate the Khmer keyboard function, check out online keyboards, install software, whatever else I thought I might need. The keyboard function and a picture of the Windows 7 Khmer keyboard layout proved to be the most useful, though I was never quite sure why the "AltGr + shift" command never worked (there are so many Khmer characters that each key gets three or four).
Then it was the laborious part of going back and forth from the picture to the document, trying to recreate the symbols in the proper order with the proper vowels on the proper consonants, and then pasting THAT into youtube.
Youtube proved totally unhelpful, but I did find a couple of the songs elsewhere, and was incredibly proud of myself when that happened. The thing is about youtube, is that the khmer songs have been transliterated to the latin alphabet, so in place of ´ecHemIlEfnagehIy you get something like "knhom jes merl ther neang hery," and the only way I'd know that is if I could read the title and could somehow guess how you put in latin letters (I can read it now, by the way, I had my teacher help me).
The title, by the way, means "I know how to look after her," which I find utterly ridiculous, but what hey, it's not my job to be snarky about the song titles.
After all was said and done and my dancers couldn't find the songs I was missing either, I contacted the person at CTN and said something like, I can't prepare the dancers without the songs, so HELP. And he did. I got the full files just like that.
Let's just not talk about the other document, for which I was somehow supposed to figure out which songs we were to prepare and discovered that it wasn't for traditional dance at all (as expected and anticipated by the presence of a Cambodian dance expert in rehearsal) but Khmer twist and cha cha cha. The dancers figured something out, thankfully, as I was caught utterly on the hop, and besides, I just learned Khmer cha cha cha.
Every day an adventure....
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