The First Victim, or “Why You Should Make an American Friend.”

I was initially surprised by my first stack of scripts. I seemed to have a pretty tough job ahead of me. I had to identify the top 10% of all the scripts, and already there was more than one I wanted to push through.

But more on those later. Let’s talk about the one that was definitely NOT going to be advancing to the next round.

Anyone who’s been a part of a screenwriting community knows just how much fussing there is over the details. Trivial things like if you can use “INT/EXT” or how to properly write a conversation over the phone dominate much of the contest discussion. Some would even swear that if your script has one comma out of place, that any judge, producer, or human being will immediately toss it into the bin.

But what if the script was in the wrong language, so you BabelFish’d it into English and sent it in without proofreading it?

I’m exaggerating of course (I hope!) but we’re fresh out of the gate and I’ve already got my first script that not only had no grasp of script formatting, but was also weak in the English language department. It was clear this writer was not from ‘round these parts, and the attempt at writing American was complicated by what we’ll call a very liberal approach to screenplay format.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some amazing non-English scripts and movies, but the old adage “write what you know” applies first and foremost to what language you’re writing in! At the very least have a native speaker edit your script so at least the dialog is accurate. There’s Americans all over the place. I know because every time I travel overseas I can’t seem to get away from them!

How do I know this person’s first language isn’t English? Believe me, I can tell.

Hang out with the exchange students throughout school and you begin to see how difficult it is for non-English speakers to make sense of English grammar rules. Asian language speakers seem to have the hardest time, though this script was likely from northern Europe. There was a clear grammar and sentence structure in this script that probably sounded a lot better in its country of origin than it ended up when it crossed my desk. It felt like I was watching a movie that was dubbed into English by voice actors that didn’t speak English themselves.

Come to think of it, that might be just absurd enough to be entertaining.

I guess it bothers me the most because these sorts of contests are not cheap. Entry fees aside, this script was mailed in meaning there was also printing and postage costs. Who knows how many other contests received a copy of this script, when the writer might have been better served by keeping closer to home. They’ve made an investment in this, put real money on the line, and I have to put them in the rejection pile because their story suffered a terminal case of Lost-in-Translation-itis.

Another one bites the dust, I suppose.