A scene partner who speaks your language

For a long time, blablabla read your scenes in nine languages. If you worked in one of them, good. If you didn't, you got a voice doing its best impression of your language with the wrong mouth. Picture an actor in Seoul running a Korean scene against a reader that sounds faintly American. Close enough to use. Never close enough to forget it's there.

That part bothered me more than I let on. I built this thing in Danish first, for myself, and then watched actors in places I'd never auditioned try to make it work in languages it didn't really speak yet.

So we kept going. The catalog is past eighty voices now, and they read in more than seventy languages. And it's available everywhere, in every store, with the app itself translated into dozens of languages. blablabla went worldwide quietly, the way most real things happen. No banner. The voices just started arriving.

Why the other voice matters more than you'd think

You don't rehearse in a vacuum. You rehearse against what you hear.

When the other part comes back at the wrong tempo, or lands the stress on the wrong syllable, your ear adjusts to it without asking you first. You learn to time your line against a rhythm that won't be in the room on the day. It feels fine while you're doing it. Then you get to the audition, a real person reads with their real cadence, and something is half a beat off and you can't say why.

A reader in your own language fixes the thing you didn't know was broken. The pauses fall where pauses actually fall. The questions go up the way questions go up in that language. You stop managing the reader and start listening to it, which is the whole point. The other voice is supposed to disappear so your line can be the only thing in the room.

More than eighty voices, in the language you work in

Here's where it stands. More than eighty voices. More than seventy languages. Each character in your scene gets a distinct one, picked to fit. Not one flat narrator doing every part in the same register.

Seventy is just a number on a page, so here's some of what it means. Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish across the Nordics. German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish through the rest of Europe. Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Russian, Ukrainian. Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Hindi, Tamil. Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese, Thai. Portuguese on both sides of the Atlantic. That's the short version.

So if you're rehearsing in your language, the odds are very good it's in there. And the catalog keeps growing, because this is the part of the app I most want to finish.

The right language isn't enough. You need the right corner of it.

This is the part I'm quietly proud of, so I'll say it plainly and move on.

Getting the language right is the floor. An actor knows in two seconds whether a voice is from their world or a tourist passing through. A Parisian scene read in Québécois French is wrong in a way no non-actor would notice and every actor would. So the catalog goes a layer deeper than language.

French comes in Parisian and Québécois. Portuguese in Brazilian and European. Mandarin from the mainland and from Taiwan. Arabic in Gulf, Levantine, and Egyptian. English in American and British. The reader doesn't just speak your language. It speaks it from roughly where your scene is set.

Most rehearsal tools give you English and maybe a few European voices on top of it. I understand why. It's a lot of work for actors who will mostly audition in English anyway. But plenty of actors aren't auditioning in English, and "close enough" is a strange thing to ask of someone whose whole job is the difference between close and exact. So we didn't stop at the easy languages. That's the whole bet, really, and it's a quiet one. We'd rather the reader just sound right than tell you how clever it is.

If working in a language that isn't your first is its own particular challenge, I wrote about that separately, in rehearsing scenes in a language that isn't your first.

Casting the other parts

In practice you barely think about any of this. You import your scene, tell it which part is yours, and the other characters get cast for you, matched by language and by whether the part reads as a man or a woman. Most of the time that's the end of it.

When it isn't, you open the voice list and recast. Hear a few, pick the one that sounds like the person you're playing against. A brother should sound like a brother, not like a brochure. The full picture of how this fits into a rehearsal is over on the features page.

Then you run the scene. The other voices speak their lines in your language, in an accent that belongs to your story, and they wait, in silence, for you to finish yours. However long that takes.

That actor in Seoul has a Korean reader now. The one in São Paulo has a Brazilian one, not a Lisbon one. The pauses land where they're supposed to. Nobody's doing an impression of anybody's language anymore. That's all I ever wanted the voices to do: get out of the way and let you act.

If you want the wider picture of working without a scene partner, it's all in the complete guide to rehearsing alone.