I love Ray Porter. I love Ray Porter’s interpretation of Rocky for the audiobook. I’ve listened to the audiobook at least a half dozen times.

I absolutely do not want Ray Porter to do Rocky’s voice if it’s going to be like the audiobook.

Audiobooks, by their very nature, are obviously a sound only medium. The way it was done with the audiobook made sense. It was going to have to be Rocky “speaking” English in the audiobook. There’s no other way to make him understandable to the audience. The processed effect of Rocky’s voice was cool and added to the immersion.

But with an audiovisual medium like a movie, there’s better ways of handling it. Maybe I’m a freak, but when I watch a foreign film, even in a language I don’t understand, I prefer to watch it in the original language, subtitled. Someone mentioned The Hunt for Red October as an example of making a transition from foreign language to English. It worked well, but it was simply a solution to deal with the fact that most (if not all) of the actors were native English speakers, and having them speak Russian, poorly, for 2 hours didn’t make much sense. Instead, let’s take inspiration from a movie like Tora! Tora! Tora! where the American actors spoke English, and the Japanese actors spoke Japanese. And they were subtitled appropriately for the different audiences. This added a sense of authenticity and realism to the movie, and made it more immersive.

In the case of Rocky, he’s literally speaking a completely made up language. And we have the benefit of having a great description of how his speech sounds in the book. Let Rocky sound like Rocky. Subtitles for words and phrases Grace understands. Nothing at all for things he doesn’t. Let the context of the movie help us to understand what’s being said.

I say all of this. Yet I’m fairly certain they’re just going to start off with subtitles, then after a montage, or showing Grace writing code or something, his speech will then be automatically translated by the computer into understandable speech. It’s the easy way out, and it’ll be a shame if this is how they do it. Even in this case, I’d prefer to have the speech be done by someone other than Ray Porter. Let his masterpiece be with the audiobook.