Yahoo News “Echo” viewers will be able to watch new Marvel series dubbed in the Choctaw language
Series protagonist Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) is a member of the Choctaw Nation, and director Sydney Freeland wanted the show to reflect her heritage.
Authenticity was important for the team behind Echo, the upcoming Marvel miniseries that stars Alaqua Cox as the mercenary Maya Lopez. Since Maya is a Native American character, director Sydney Freeland and her team consulted with the Choctaw Nation about the history, costumes, and characters. But the collaboration went even further than that. EW can exclusively reveal that the Echo team produced a full audio dub of the series in the Choctaw language.
“In the process of working and collaborating with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, in working with the Choctaw language experts and consultants, it became very apparent that we needed to do a dub in Choctaw as well,” Freeland tells EW. “And we're incredibly proud of it.”
"Placing the story of Echo in the actual Choctaw language helps make our character more authentic to her heritage, because we get to delve into the specifics of Choctaw culture and traditions," Freeland tells EW. "I'm indigenous, I'm American, but I'm Navajo. And the Choctaw language and the Navajo language are completely different from each other; they're as different as Portuguese and Polish. And so one of the things that was important for us was making sure that we had people who were experts in Choctaw language. But a lot of really great things came out of that collaboration — specifically, in the second episode of our series, we actually get to see a portion of pre-European contact America that I can genuinely say has never been seen on film before. That came as a direct result of our collaboration with the Choctaw Nation in trying to tell a more authentic story."
In the exclusive video above, you can watch Freeland and consultant Terry Billy work on recording the dub. You can also see some footage from Echo that teases just how much the show draws from Choctaw history and culture.
Chuck Zlotnick
Zahn McClarnon, Devery Jacobs, Graham Greene, and Tantoo Cardinal in 'Echo.'Different audio dubs in various languages are common for films released internationally. Hayao Miyazaki’s new animated film The Boy and the Heron, for example, is widely available in both its original Japanese and an English language version. The Choctaw language is not as widely spoken as either of those, which made it challenging — but also extremely rewarding.
“I became a translator for my grandmother, who didn’t speak English, beginning at a young age. I’ve lived a life of interpreting the world from English to Choctaw,” consultant Terry Billy tells EW. “The crisis of tribal language loss has heightened my purpose in exploring opportunities to provide many avenues to attract new language learners and preserve the language in all its aspects from spirituality to social conversations.”
By incorporating the Choctaw language into visual storytelling, and just simply by demonstrating how it is spoken, this Echo dub can function as a learning resource for years to come, according to Billy.
“The most important aspect of translating from English to Choctaw is to get as close to the intended verbiage or context,” Billy says. “However, when that is not possible ,‘interpreting’ in everyday Choctaw then becomes the path to fulfill the context. Allowing us to express the story from our language perspective with its cultural connotations made this project very meaningful.”
All five episodes of Echo stream on Hulu and Disney+ on Jan. 9.
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