You must have all heard about the devastation caused by the huge earthquakes in southern Turkey and northwest Syria in the early hours of Monday 6 February. Most people were asleep then. A few days after the earthquake, I was asked if over the weekend I would want to go to London and assist the BBC Panorama team who were making a documentary about it. I didn’t exactly know what the assistance required, exactly entailed as it was all being done on very short notice, but I wanted to get involved.
When I arrived at the editing studios used by the Panorama team in central London, the atmosphere was quite tense. The team was still waiting for the necessary footage and scripts to arrive for me to work on. It normally takes the team about 10 weeks to produce one programme, but now they had to do it in less than a week. Moreover, this time it involved multiple languages which made things more complicated. This is because producers couldn’t directly understand what was being said in the large amounts of footage they were receiving.
As they only had some footage but no scripts, we decided to go through the footage to label certain parts of it according to timestamps so they could refer to them later when they needed to. Together, we sorted through this footage, titled various scenes, and identified the starts and ends. The next day, some transcriptions were provided for this footage and one of the other tasks involved creating subtitles using these transcriptions. As they were very specific about the final subtitles and how they worded them, we created these subtitles that were plain, accurate, and suitable for UK English.
Articulating and translating emotion amidst chaos and devastation
The team used their footage fresh from the earthquake zone as well as other footage obtained from various sources and social media. Most of the footage was so powerful, showing the devastating aftermaths of the deadly earthquakes that killed over 45.000 people in Turkey alone to date. This was also true of footage recorded during the second powerful earthquake showing multi-story buildings that stood the first earthquake, collapse amidst ongoing rescue efforts. Some towns in Southeast Turkey were entirely wiped out by the earthquakes. Unfortunately, the initial government response was slow, partly due to the scale of the earthquakes, the destruction they caused, and the size of the affected area. Some places didn’t receive any help within the first two days following the earthquakes.
The next day, as well as identifying various scenes from the footage, I found myself working with various members of the team. On occasions I was editing the same subtitles with different editors. There were some inaccuracies in some of the transcript. Some parts of it were unclear and complicated. The most effective thing was to listen to the footage and re-produce the subtitles that weren’t accurate. Background noises in some of the footage as well as in the studio made it more difficult to accurately understand what was being said. As the initial rescue effort was slow to reach to most of the areas affected, some of the footage from the early days of the earthquake contained people crying and screaming for help, expressing their anger at the slow government response. Some scenes included multiple people, all expressing their views and complaints at the same time, in a very understandably emotional way. In one scene, a young female was begging several army personnel not to leave. It took me a while to establish that she was trying to say that if they leave now, they won’t be allowed to come back later. She was hopelessly asking for help to rescue their loved ones from under the rubble. The programme also features an interview with a survivor who was rescued by a friend. This was also very emotionally driven as the survivor had lost several family members including her own mother. Her mother gave her last breath while lying on top of her under the rubble. This situation eventually helped her survive until she was rescued from under the rubble by a friend who recognised her from her hair. I found articulating and producing clear and plain subtitles from some parts of the interview challenging. This was especially after what had already been a long day, and when we were approaching the late evening.
On Sunday night, it was time to watch what was already produced, so they could decide what kind of changes they needed to make to the entire program. This was supposed to happen at 9 pm but it was delayed by 1.5 hours and took about an hour which meant that it was now nearly midnight. This meant working through the night. In one edit room they were having difficulties locating a scene and needed my help to find it. It was 3am and I remember myself barely being able to move my lips let alone try and accurately live translate – I think I was in a state when I was already subconsciously half asleep. At that point, I was asked by a different team member to translate part of a speech given by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a couple of days after the earthquakes first hit. It had been a long day as I started at 2pm and I could no longer function. When I left just after 3am there were still several members of the team working but hardly anyone on the streets of central London.
I came back in the morning to do one final check of the subtitles after 3 hours of sleep at a nearby hotel only to find out that some of the subtitles we had edited during the night had disappeared. This meant that I had to re-produce them with a different member of the production team, and after that my job was finally done.
From working in my solitary environment to stepping into a highly demanding team environment was a tiring but fascinating and enjoyable experience. I was very happy that I could assist Panorama with this difficult and stressful task. I was very impressed with their professionalism and meticulousness and could see in each team member that they all carried out their job with a true spirit of journalism.
Panorama, Aftershock: The Turkey-Syria Earthquake: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001jm53 via @bbciplayer
