How did it start? I've had the artist's spirit since I was a little kid, but I'm very shy. A lot of music
has always been heard at home and music has always been present in the family: my grandfather was Txistulari, I had a close relationship with the multifaceted Josu Goia de Bera… In the ikastola I started with the Txistu and then went to the choir. As a child, I always danced with my sister and imitated her, but then I struggled to put myself in public. However, when I was 16, the crew members formed the Seihots group and proposed to me to be a singer and I said yes.

And how was the jump to the theater? The Golden
Apple Quartet cast for a children's musical theater and introduced me. They needed Basque actors with a tendency to comedy and there I saw an opportunity. I was chosen and worked with them on three assemblies. It was my school of actors.

How did you start as a duplicator?
I always liked dubbing. Some students from Madrid opened a doubling school in Pamplona and I signed up there. It was to interpret, but in the shadow, not in public, and that's why I found it appropriate.

In 2003, I started working gradually on the Basque doubles making small and then larger characters. Amazing spies, a series that repeats at ETB, penguin Happy Feet, Eragon, iguana Iggy de Animalia, or the song singer of One Piece and Pokemon, among others. Then I participated in some series in Madrid and I was tempted to stay, but I like to speak in Basque and because I had no work I decided to stay here.

Over the past twenty years, ETB doubling budgets have been steadily decreasing. How has it affected the professionals? Today they are
becoming duplicate, but much less so than before. ETB is the largest audiovisual dubbing agent in Basque. Dubbing in Basque lived its peak in the 1980s, when ETB doubled about 2,000 hours a year. In the 1990s, this time was halved and in 2021 barely doubled to 200 hours in Basque, almost all of them in cartoons. ETB says that the number of duplicates has increased lately, but here we have to differentiate what is doubling in Euskera and what in Spanish to issue them in ETB2, which often put everything in the same bag.

ETB’s budgetary constraints have led to a decline in working conditions year by year. Mixer is a company awarding dubbing in Basque for Basque television and has worked in very precarious conditions. This was one of the reasons why the Bieuse partnership was founded in 2018. Those of us who met in this association decided not to work for Mixer, but other professionals continued working with them and then we lost the strength that gave us to go together.

Are they now performing all the dubbing tasks? For ETB, yes. There were few people and I think the quality also decreased. It is true that there was an opportunity for new people to join, and that they were offered training and a way of working quickly. That should be good for one sector, because the relay and the new talents are always needed, but this profession is not learned from one day to the next and the problems of forming groups of actors have come to light. I think in some cases they are making heavy characters before they are well prepared, which has
influenced the quality of the product.

And who are you in Bieus what are you doing? Now we Bieus members have created a cooperative so that we ourselves can perform some tasks directly. We have made a couple of films for the Festival, Harrapatu flag and Tadeo Jones II, I myself did the role of Tadeo and we
are working with other studies. Archipelago or invisible Wall with the Ulu Media study, which has performed podcasts, for example. Some mythical voices from Bieus, like Iñaki Beraetxe or Klara Badiola, can be heard there. We are now talking directly to the big platforms and we hope that we will soon have good news.

The new state audiovisual law states that 6% of the contents emitted by private platforms should be works in Catalan, Galician and Basque. Does this open new doors? There is certainly one step, but, as Jon Artatxo says, from the producer association IBAIA, it would be good to set up an independent monitoring committee to ensure compliance with these minima everywhere. To the legal requirement, we must add the pressure that society has been exerting lately so that the contents in Basque are present in the large private platforms. Apps Euskaraz, for example, is doing a great job, and it is true that they are beginning to notice changes. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of audiovisuals in Basque increased slightly from 65 to 108
on Filme, from 3 to 85 on Netflix, from 2 to 71 on Prime videon and from 0 to 4 on HBO. Other times, like at Disney, they haven't done anything yet.

In recent years, Netflix has been working a lot as a Galician, and it seems that the Basque country is also going to do that. For us it is very positive and a new job opportunity. These orders can come directly from the platforms. There is no ETB or government. It's a free market, and if a platform sees a studio working orderly, it can contact it directly to start a project. In addition, they normally put quality above cheap price, not like ETB, and so I think there will be opportunities to do very ordered jobs from now on. The administrators of the Bieuse cooperative have worked hard with this window. We hope that new winds will come.

ETB has launched the
new Basque streaming platform, which will start in the autumn. Will it give a boost to the folds and subsections? It will certainly be positive. Having a platform in Basque, whatever the offer, is always good. Let us see what this purpose is. They announce new works of foreign fiction. A set of series and movies of 400 hours, but not folded, but subtitled. Now, I'm not going to go into that fight between subscript and dubbing, because there's been a lot of talk about it, but it's clear that ETB is going to be betting on subtitles. In a conference held in Pamplona in early May, ETB director Unai Iparragirre stressed that young people prefer subtitles to doubles. I believe that this debate has been overtaken a long time ago and it is best that with a button the viewer can choose how he wants to see everything. On the other hand, it remains to be seen how much money they invest in carrying out new jobs and in duplicating or underwriting external work.

In general, it seems that ETB’s commitment will be in favour of promoting new local productions and offering external content with subtitles. We are also in favour of production, certainly, but we think it is a trap to introduce production, dubbing and subtitling into the same bag when drawing up budgets or granting subsidies. They're different things, and society needs all three. Let us not mix everything. In fact, the absence of powerful content of foreign fiction has been one of the causes of the decrease in the use of Euskera in recent years.

How much does the use of dubbing benefit? Much has been said
about this, and what we ourselves, the duplicators, warned when four years ago the issue was put on the table. Today, however, society and Euskaltzaindia, the Council and many other Basque agents are doing so. When we talk about the normalization of Euskera, it is clear that dubbing brings great benefits for hearing. According to experts, a language goes into the ears and out of the mouth.

Our young people spend an average of fourteen hours on screens, at school and at home, and almost everything they consume in their free time is in languages other than Basque. Fiction, social networks, podcasts and duplicate content can help improve the Basque level of young generations. But to do so we have to consider all kinds of content, not just cartoons for children.

The other day a debate came on Twitter when a father said he did not understand the text of a disease given to his daughter in school, because very "rare" words appeared. The writer Juan Luis Zabala responded that if ETB1 gave all the sections of House doctor folded in Euskera, he would have no problem understanding what will be the first.

How do you see your future? The voice world is very broad. With the Ulu Media study, for example, some folding actors
are now working on various sound fictions, and they're also going to do some content by pairs to take them out of here. There is opening another world to work. We have good relationships with other studies and we've always had them next door. If I had asked myself two years ago, I would say that I saw everything in black as a duplicator, but today I'm more optimistic because you see there's something
moving.

In the section on own projects, we are satisfied with the implementation of the brand Sudurgorri Vocal Studio. We work with voices for different advertising and video agencies, and vocal training is also one of our passions. Personally, I would like to do something similar to the sound fictions that they do at RTVE, that is, to
read plays in a theater, with actors and before the public. They do it and they broadcast it live. That world attracts me a lot and maybe we should...

What is the hardest thing in this profession? The key to bending work is not in the voice. All voices are nice and necessary, but we must be
able to act. You need to be an actor and to be a good actor you don't get overnight. It's lifelong learning. The interpretation begins with learning and developing the technique of synchronization. For this you have a director next to you who helps you give the best of you. It also requires flexibility. The current bending technique is not the same as before. Before, in general, the voice was projected more. Today, the way to make film is much more natural and, in these cases, dubbing also needs it. In short, the key is to reflect what they have done in their original version.

LAST WORD

Public support

“As in all minority languages, dubbing in Basque needs public support, as it is not commercially sustainable. However, for years the wager of the Basque Government and EITB has been very different. The Basque Government doubles every year a few films for the Zinema Euskaraz program (in 2021 there were nine, only 20 hours). And the situation with EITB is also not much better since in the late 1990s it was decided to put aside the dubbing in Basque.”