So the scripts have been written in English
and translated into Welsh by Anwen Huws,
who's a Welsh writer.
It's been really very straightforward, actually.
Anwefis a very good writer in her own right,
and a very good translator.
I know various actors who are on this production,
who I've known a long time who speak Welsh.
They've looked at the translations
and really liked them.
I can't judge them yet. I'm learning Welsh at the moment
but I'm not at a standard where I can judge them.
He might be sulking somewhere. He used to do that as a kid.
- About what? - I don't know. You're his wife.
- Yeah. - Mummy and 1 have both noticed
- that he's looking older. - He's 40.
And smoking again.
(They speak Welsh)
(Doorbell rings)
I think it's more challenging for the actors than for us.
If you haven't done it before,
it takes a bit of getting used to,
switching from one to the other,
because we do every setup twice.
Mrs Howells? Steve Baldini.
(Scene is spoken in Welsh)
Doing this in two languages can be a bit of a...
...headspin at times.
We're kind of getting used to it in Wales now,
cos a lot of stuffs being done back to back.
I guess that the difference is,
you have to kind of treat them separately, in a way.
You can't think of them as the same thing and just translate.
They're not.
They stand alone, I think.
Once you change the language, you change the whole kind of...
...feel of it, you know.
And people's characters are slightly different.
So you have to kind of think of them as the same narrative
but they are separate kind of pieces, really.
If we were filming this conversation
between you and myself,
we would do the scene in English,
so that everyone understands what the scene is about.
Not everyone is a Welsh speaker. So we do it in English.
Then to keep the setup as it is, then I would do it in Welsh.
Then we would turn around.
And the camera would be on you, for example.
Then you would do it in Welsh, then you would do it in English.
Then we go to another angle, do it in English, then in Welsh.
And so en, depending en new many angles the director needs.
We are constantly back and fonh, back and fonh.
Hey. Batman's here. Do you want to come in?
Well, if that's all right.
We thought we'd offer you some moral support.
Oh.
Marion will be along in a minute.
Great.
Oh, no, no.
No, don't be nice to me. No!
Listen.
Between you and me, how are the finances?
(Scene is spoken in Welsh)
It takes a couple of days
to get your head around the two languages, I think.
But once you've done it, it's fine.
You know that that's the drill,
and you can work with it.
So it's not a problem, really.
If we could do the scene entirely in English, great.
Then entirely in Welsh, great.
Because your mind would be focused on the language
at that particular time.
But, no, we're mixing it up all the time,
from a technical point of view,
purely so we've got the cameras and lighting and everything.
It doesn't have to be reset every single time.
(Scene is spoken in Welsh)
EVE: I don't speak Welsh at all.
The only thing I could say in Welsh was the school I went to,
my secondary school.
So as you can imagine, it's hilarious.
(sfiiggers)
It's been the biggest challenge of my professional career-
not even my professional career,
it's been the biggest challenge I've ever done.
I think I turned the job down two or three times
because I don't speak Welsh.
But I got to a point where I needed a challenge,
I needed to get my mojo back
and I needed to get excited about my job again.
It came at the right time and I thought,
"Well, let's try it."
(Scene is spoken in Welsh)
NORA: It takes about 50 per cent more time.
Because you're already set up for the shot...
Yeah, it doesn't take twice as long, but it...
So instead of shooting an episode in two weeks,
we shoot an episode in three weeks in two languages.
It's a different biorhythm
or a different...muscle on set.
You have to do everything twice.
I've just taken the position of: make that an advantage.
We don't do it in one language and then try to replicate it.
We just continue mining
and discovering what the scene is about in both languages.
Am I missing something here?
If clients are being compromised
by some issue between you and him, I deserve to know.
No, no, no, no, no, no. It's probably just. ..
It's a misunderstanding, that's all.
(Scene is spoken in Welsh)
HANNAH: You benefit from doing it twice in both languages.
Because you're so restricted for time on TV.
So it gives you an opportunity to do it for double the time
but you find nuances in one language you don't in the other.
You get a whole load more time to explore
when you do it in both languages.
You are a slightly different character when doing it in Welsh
as opposed to doing it in English.
There's something about maybe the cultural reference
or the fact there are fewer Welsh speakers to be had...
When a Welsh speaker meets another one
anywhere in the world, that's all they'll speak.
It's very difficult then to speak anything else,
unless someone comes along and is an English speaker,
then you will change out of manners,
and being decent, so the other person can understand.
There are very few Welsh speakers around.
There is a closeness that you don't get
in a language like English,
where so many, many, many people speak it.
What's interesting is,
actually when you see the subtle differences
in the actors' performance in Welsh and English.
You particularly find at the more emotional moments,
the temperature goes up several more degrees
when it's performed in Welsh.
There's something a little more Mediterranean
about the temperament.
I guess it makes it more interesting to play, really.
Cos you kind of steal from the other, you know.
In the English version,
you might find something in the Welsh version
that you can then feed into the English version, you know'?
I think it the end, they will be quite different.
Because everyone, when they speak a different language,
you're different.
If you speak French, you've got different gestures
to if you speak English.
You speak from a different place in your voice.
And you speak from a different place in yourself.
You can signal different things
because you're in another language.
The emotion needs to be the same,
you need to get the same story and message over.
But sometimes the things unsaid... left unsaid...
speak far more powerfully.
One interesting is that the timings are quite different.
All the Welsh scenes time out longer than the English scenes.
And also you can see slightly different personalities
of the actors in each language, as well.
Blood, sweat and tears.
No magic wands, no special coaching.
Nora, the producer, came round once a week
just to kind of let me read to her.
And if I had any difficulty, which I did...
...hugely, in the beginning, because...
lam Welsh, I do live in Wales.
But I've never spoken Welsh.
There's been no Welsh in my house, my father is Glaswegian.
So it was a foreign language to me.
It could have been a Russian script put in front of me
or it could have been in Japanese,
I would have gone through the same process.
It was as scary as that.
So, yeah, there's no magic way of doing it,
sitting down, hours and hours and hours and hours of work.
But I was prepared to do it.
There's something in the Celtic history of Wales,
which is quite poetic.
It'll come out in the visual imagery,
it also comes out in the way in which people speak.
And it's almost as if spoken dialogue,
whether spoken in Welsh-accented English or in Welsh,
just takes on that poetic quality.
Sc I'm finding it artistically a really rich experience.