For Tamil speakers who couldn’t understand the majority of HRD Minister Smriti Irani’s Parliament speech which was in Hindi, the BJP’s Tamil Nadu page came to the rescue.
A video of the speech surfaced with one major, helpful difference – it was dubbed to a T in Tamil, with emotion, dramatic pauses and heaving sighs in place.
“We didn’t want language to be a barrier for those who want to listen to her speech and better understand the issue,” said SG Suryah, BJP state campaign manager.
So the campaign team pooled in Hindi speakers among their friends, translated the speech and set out to look for a dubbing artist.
“We wanted the artist who normally dubs for Smriti Irani here in the translated version of her Hindi serial, but dates didn’t match and we got another artist,” Suryah said.
Suryah and his team were overwhelmed by the response they received overnight. But the possibility of dubbing more speeches in Tamil was met with skepticism.
“We are scared our opponents might misuse the dubbed speeches, because technology now allows anyone to do anything with it. We don’t want what we did out of good intention to boomerang on us.” he shared.
The video has been shared over 2,000 times in the last 12 hours. “We’ve had people from America thanking us and showering praise for our initiative. We will translate more depending on further responses.”