Romanians Also Weep | Translation

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Translated by MC Editorial

[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón. 

OK, then: Eastern Europe. Romania. A day like any other in 1998.

[Vlad Radulian]: And from 7:00 in the evening onward they no longer answered the door, the phone or anything at all.

[Daniel]: This is Vlad Radulian. A Romanian. He was 19 years old at the time.

[Vlad]: My aunts and my grandmothers… This was something out of this world for them, because they saw colorful things, they saw life, and it was something fantastic and they loved it.

[Daniel]: That fantastic thing full of color was new then in Romania. But maybe not so new for our Radio Ambulante listeners.

The television sets in thousands of Romanian households were turned on in the evening to watch…

[Archive soundbite: THEME SONG ESMERALDA]

[Daniel]: Latin American soap operas. 

Vlad, unlike his aunts and grandmothers, was not glued to the screen. He didn’t need to be. He had usually seen the episodes already. He worked doing Romanian subtitles for these Spanish-language soap operas. And he witnessed how the country came to a standstill every evening, thousands and thousands of people obsessed with the plots and intrigues of the soap operas. The evil twin. The family hiding a terrible secret. The poor woman who becomes rich. 

[Vlad]: Afterwards, they met at the market and they would say, “Did you see what this actress did? She said this and that,” and they took it so personally. Everything. It was a phenomenon—and we really can call it a phenomenon.

[Daniel]: How did these Latin American melodramas end up in a place that feels so far away? And what did they mean to all those people?

Well, much more than you might imagine.

We’ll be back after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Spanish journalist Lola García-Ajofrín brings us the story. I leave you with Lola.

[Lola García-Ajofrín]: We’ll get back to Vlad. But first, I want you to know how I came to this story. I moved to Romania in 2023 and started doing reporting. I’ve been traveling the world for almost a decade, and Romania seemed like an interesting place to start from scratch. It’s a part of Europe forgotten by the media. When I got there, I didn’t know much about the country, but I soon realized how easy it was to feel at home.

What surprised me most when I arrived was that, when I introduced myself to other colleagues or someone new, and when I said—in English—that I am Spanish, many people immediately responded to me in a strangely clear Spanish. And strangely… It was Latin American Spanish

When I asked them how they knew Spanish, almost all of them gave me the same answer: thanks to soap operas.  “La Usurpadora,” “Esencia de Mujer,” “Rebelde Way,” “Betty La Fea,” “Muñeca Brava.” The entire canon of television drama from the region. Until then, my only contact with these series had been one summer in the early 90s, when I was just a little girl and my grandmother got hooked in the afternoons on one called “Cristal,” while my sister and I did crossword puzzles. That’s why this whole phenomenon in Romania seemed so curious to me.

But it’s better understood with a little history. At the end of the 80s, Romania—like a large part of Eastern Europe—had been living for 40 years under a Communist regime, one of the most oppressive in the area. It lasted from the end of World War II until 1989. And during that time, television was very different.  

[Archive soundbite: start of television programming]

[Vlad]: There was almost nothing on TV. Only three hours a day of political party programs or newscasts, and occasionally a Russian or Bulgarian film.

And for the remaining 21 hours of the day, a blank screen with static.

[Archive soundbite: Original static]

[Lola]: Communism in Romania was particularly brutal because of one specific man: Nicolae Ceaușescu. Unlike other Eastern European countries such as Poland or Hungary, where the Communist Party was the ultimate authority image, in Romania, Ceaușescu established a personality cult, projecting himself as a supreme, untouchable leader, with songs of praise to him… 

[Archive soundbite: Ceausescu propaganda music]

[Lola]: … that elevated him to the status of nothing less than the savior of the Romanians, nicknamed “the Genius of the Carpathians” or “The Dear and Esteemed Leader.” But under his rule, Romania ended up experiencing times of terrible scarcity and repression. Ceaușescu did not want to owe anyone anything, so he decided to eliminate the foreign debt by demanding greater productivity from workers and reducing expenses.

This had a direct impact on the living conditions of the Romanian people. The queues in front of shops to get eggs, butter, or pig’s feet, which Romanians jokingly called “training shoes,” became longer and longer. Sometimes you had to wait not knowing what product you would take home. Heating became a luxury that almost no one could afford.

There was also extreme surveillance. Microphones installed in homes and offices by hundreds of thousands of informants of the Securitate, Ceaușescu’s security department, who monitored the population constantly. As a result, an estimated two million people, whether dissidents or political rivals, spent time in prisons, camps or other places of detention. 

[Archive soundbite: Ceaușescu’s last speech]

[Lola]: With a terribly impoverished and angry population, his rule ended in bloodshed… with a revolution in the streets in which over 1,000 people died, among them, Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, whose bullet-riddled bodies were shown on television as proof that the future would be different.

So the 1990s were uncertain in Romania. A country that had never really had a consolidated democracy now had to build a system practically from scratch.

But along with the uncertainty, there were other things too…

[Vlad]: In a world of Communism, where you had practically nothing—although I can’t say that we lacked things, but there wasn’t a lot of variety, and seeing that people could live in a different way, people’s mentality began to change.

[Lola]: Hope, the dream of prosperity, opening up to a world that felt completely foreign.

In those years, with the end of Communism, private channels began broadcasting, like Pro TV, now one of the country’s leading television stations. They broadcast foreign series and films, as well as news. But it wasn’t long before they started bringing in soap operas en masse.

Only a few years earlier, the state channel had broadcast “La Esclava Isaura,” a Brazilian soap opera from the 70s. 

[Archive soundbite: intro of the soap opera La Esclava Isaura]

[Lola]:  People were fascinated. And for private companies like Pro TV, knowing about this success was key to solving a very basic problem, the most basic for a channel: in order to sell advertising and be self-sustaining, they needed programming. Programming that did not exist. There was no local production industry.

In Romania, no series, no movies were being made—practically nothing.

But now, there were thousands of companies, like Coca Cola, fast food chains, and even soap and detergent brands of all kinds, all eager to advertise in countries of the former Communist bloc. It was a new, unexplored market.

So this part of Europe began to organize fairs in hotels and convention centers. Fairs where television executives went to buy their programming. As package deals. 

[Vlad]: Because they would buy one—the best, the most popular, the newest one—and two or three that were a little bit outdated, but that way they got a very good price overall.

[Lola]:  And soap operas were such a good business that ProTV decided to create a channel just for them, focused on women: Acasă, which means “At Home.”

Vlad ended up there because he knew Spanish… and many other languages as well. His father was a diplomat who spent his life moving from country to country, but during the Ceaușescu regime, Vlad and his twin brother couldn’t go with him. They had to stay in Romania with their mother as a guarantee that their father would return. But once the regime fell, Vlad, his brother, and his mother were finally able to live with him abroad. 

[Vlad]: Every four years, we would move to a different country. And he would send us to state schools to learn the language, so we went to Greece and I had to learn Greek, to Portugal and I had to learn Portuguese.

[Lola]: Back in Romania, they enrolled in the Liceo Cervantes, a school where they studied Spanish. That’s how they learned the language. And at age 19, they decided to study it formally, for a degree. It was 1998 and one day, at the university, they saw an advertisement. 

[Vlad]: And one day we saw a poster in a hallway at the university, that said someone was hiring subtitle translators for this television network called ACasăTV. And they had just laid the groundwork for this new television network, specifically to broadcast only Latin American soap operas.

[Lola]: They went to some auditions and were chosen to work as subtitlers. 

[Vlad]: It was quite difficult for me, because we had to count the syllables of each word manually, you might say. And there were no computers; we did the translation on paper and there were only three computers in the entire television station. And other people were hired as typists and typed out our translation.

[Lola]: What Vlad never imagined was that that would be his job for the next 20 years—translating soap opera eight hours a day. And it took discipline. For example, with period soap operas… 

[Vlad]: There were some historical ones, and sometimes you had to do some preparation and look at the context to be able to do a translation as close to the reality of the soap opera as possible. Because it’s absurd to use very modern words and neologisms. And because it’s a period soap opera, you have to take the historical aspects into account somehow.

[Lola]: He also realized that Spanish was complex, that it didn’t depend just on the time period, but on geography also. Things that are said one way in one country are said in a completely different way elsewhere. Words that mean different things depending on where you are. Accents, sayings… a whole world. And Vlad enjoyed it.

Of course, he also liked seeing his name at the end of each episode as a translator. Appearing on TV, even just in the credits, felt great. Over time, he rose through the ranks of the channel, began training other translators and subtitlers, and gained more decision-making power as to how that Latin American world was presented to his country. He also began to do live dubbing when Latin American actors and actresses came to do interviews or shows.

And while that was happening, he noticed something that surprised him.  He had become a very specific kind of celebrity. 

[Vlad]: There were even forums where people would comment, and if they didn’t like something in the translation, they would post it. 

[Lola]: That is, they were commenting on his work. Many of the comments were about the translations he did live on various television shows. 

[Vlad]: “I think the voice was Vlad Radulian’s, and what a translation, what a good translation he did,” and similar things. People were commenting, and they knew the name and the voice. And when I went to the market and I was talking, people would ask, “Where have I heard your voice?” “And after such-and-such a television program yesterday, did you do the translation?” “Yes, yes, that was me.” I once got an apple that way, for that reason. From my fans, let’s say.

[Lola]: And apparently, things went even further. A colleague even told me that in his hometown there was a cow called Esmeralda, the name of the protagonist in a Mexican soap opera.

So, over time, the result of this television phenomenon was that the Spanish language began to creep into Romania.

As many of you may know, unlike countries such as Russia or Poland, where languages are derived from Proto-Slavic languages, Romanian is a Romance language, derived from Latin. In that respect, Romania actually had more in common with us Spanish-speakers than with the Communist bloc. 

[Vlad]: We Romanians, even if we don’t know Spanish, French or Italian, we understand them all, but not the other way around. If an Italian or a Spaniard listens to a Romanian speaking, they don’t understand. Maybe they notice certain words that sound familiar, but no. For Romanians it’s very easy, and we understand about 80% of the words without knowing the language.

[Silvia Rivera Alfaro]: My name is Silvia Rivera Alfaro. I am a linguist. I studied at the University of Costa Rica.

[Lola]: I spoke to her to get a better understanding of this phenomenon.

[Silvia]: I am currently working on my PhD, with an emphasis on Hispanic Sociolinguistics. In 2009-2010, I lived in Romania, and that’s where my interest in soap operas comes from.

[Lola]: It all started when she noticed something in the way her roommates interacted at her student residence. 

[Silvia]: There were four of us in a room, and my three Romanian roommates would fight in Spanish. I mean, no, they didn’t speak Spanish, but they fought in Spanish. “I hate you, I can’t stand you, shut up, stupid.” I’m sorry, there are too many bad words in one line, but, I mean, it was really interesting to see how Spanish was being used by three people who didn’t speak it. For other uses of it. This was their Spanish—fighting Spanish.

[Lola]: Silvia watched in fascination.

[Silvia]: Maybe it softened the fight. We would have to know how they felt about it, but maybe it gave them a little distance… They seemed to enjoy it as if it were a bit of a joke, but at the same time they did it while they were having problems, so it was a strange interaction, you know?

[Lola]: Strange because most people don’t learn a language to fight with their friends, but for more practical reasons…

[Silvia]: You learn certain uses of the language for certain purposes, for certain places, right? Like to be able to pay for something at a restaurant, to be able to go to the bank, I don’t know, to be able to participate at an event. And it was interesting to me that what they had gotten from soap operas was how to fight. 

[Lola]: Her research was exploratory and descriptive, rather than statistical. She interviewed Romanians and foreigners and came to a conclusion:

[Silvia]: In soap operas, the emotional aspect is key, and in fact that is one of the themes that emerged in my work. The type of vocabulary that many people learned had to do with emotions.

[Lola]: The emotions… Because, as Vlad said a moment ago, the country was dominated by gray. And the possibility of expressing emotions in Spanish brought color to the lives of many people. 

[Daniel]: After the break, we spoke to one of those people. We’ll be back.

[Daniel]: We’re back. This is Lola García-Ajofrín.  

[Lola]: OK. So… I want to introduce you to another of the people I met in Romania. Her name is Delia Marinescu. She is 33 years old. She is a journalist and documentary filmmaker.

[Delia Marinescu]: I watched soap operas when I was a child. And my Spanish also comes from soap operas.

[Lola]: I met Delia in a bar with some other friends, and from the moment she found out I was Spanish, she never stopped speaking in my language. She told me that she watched soap operas non-stop from the age of 7 to 15. Mexican, Venezuelan, Colombian, Argentinean. Everything she could watch.

Later, she went on to other things, like any teenager. With a few classes as an adult, she managed to refine her Spanish. She even studied in Madrid for six months.

It was her sister—a year older than she—who had introduced her to soap operas. It was normal in Romania for both parents to work, so the children spent many afternoons alone at home, looking for ways to entertain themselves for a while before doing their homework. 

[Delia]: We had a computer; we had some Empire building games or something like that. It was a shooting game. Solitaire. We played a lot in front of the apartment, with other neighbors, with kids our age. 

[Lola]: And when the soap operas started airing, her sister got hooked. 

[Delia]: She would invite me to watch soap operas, and at first I didn’t understand what was happening, and I would ask my sister, “Is that bad or is that good? Which one is the bad guy? Which is the good guy? Which one is the bad girl? Which is the good one?” So I could figure out whose side to be on.

[Lola]: The truth is that Delia was not a fan right away. 

[Delia]: Sometimes it seemed exaggerated; they exaggerate their feelings, the manner. Yes, I understood that they are suffering—but not THAT much. But it depended on the story, because if the story was well done, as a 12-year-old, I accepted it.

[Lola]: But she remembers when everything clicked. It was in the fall of 1998 when they started broadcasting…

[Archive soundbite: La Usurpadora]

[Lola]: The Mexican soap opera “La Usurpadora.” Two twin sisters separated at birth meet as adults.

[Delia]: “La Usurpadora” was one of my favorites. It was a switch between two sisters; one was poor, one was rich, and they met in a bathroom and the rich one suggested to the poor one that they change their lives.

[Lola]: The rich one wanted to run away with her lover.… 

[Archive soundbite La Usurpadora]

[Twin 1]: If you fixed yourself up and dressed like me, I’m sure you would be mistaken for me.

[Twin 2]: No, ma’am, I wouldn’t know how to dress or put on makeup like you. I’m not used to it. 

[Twin 1]: One gets used to everything in life, my dear. And especially to the good things.

[Delia]: I was really impacted by how the poor girl was finally living a good life, and I learned a lot about the differences, about social injustice, the poor, the rich, which I saw very clearly. It was so clear and well explained. And that touched me.

[Lola]: It was the first time she had seen luxury, high living. This had been absent in her country for decades, except for the top leaders of the Communist Party. And more importantly, the fact that someone had nothing and someone else had too much—more than they needed—was still inconceivable for a girl in Romania back then. No one had much, of course, but everyone had the same. And this was the promise of getting out of that. Maybe not being rich, but having the possibility of accessing more. Ceaușescu’s death had brought the hope that life could be different. And in some details of daily life, the results of that opening were becoming evident.

[Delia]: We had food, and our parents or grandparents always made references to the fact that now we have this which we didn’t have before. Even now people say, “We didn’t have that kind of food before.”

[Lola]: But Romania was still one of the poorest countries in Europe, and the post-Communist migration was huge, an exodus of between 3 and 5 million. Farmers and builders, doctors and engineers, all in search of better opportunities and salaries. The Spanish of soap operas also helped in this. Today, Spain, Italy and Germany are the countries with the largest communities of Romanians. Many chose Spain because of the similarity of the language. And what they were looking for was not very different from what Delia saw on television: Possibilities. Adventure.

[Archive soundbite: La Usurpadora]

[Twin 1]: It’s a good proposition. If you lived in my house, pretending to be me, you would be an esteemed, obeyed, and respected lady. You would enjoy a wonderful life, let’s say for a year. 

[Lola]: And prosperity, a better life. 

[Archive soundbite: La Usurpadora]

[Twin 1]: At the end of that year, I will return, take my place again and give you a considerable amount of money, which will take care of your future life.

[Lola]: And at the same time, the most important lesson Delia learned from soap operas—beyond a language or a notion of social inequality—was one something more useful for everyday life. That is what we referred to earlier: being able to talk about emotions. Soap operas were a kind of manual on other ways of loving, of being happy, of dreaming, of coping with sadness.

[Delia]: Our country was not used to talking about emotions. Teachers did not talk about personal issues. It was not like it is now. It was very school-like, practical things, work. It was very fixed. I don’t know, very rigid. Soap operas were a space where someone explained to you what it means to fall in love, what it means to cheat, the poor, the rich, what friendship means.

[Lola]: And they also taught Delia, her sister and her friends what rebellion meant, especially teenage rebellion, in a society that still remembered with fear the need to follow orders.

[Delia]: It was very revealing, very revealing. I tell you, it was something very intense for us, because we don’t express ourselves like that, so openly, with so much vitality. We were more closed as a culture, more introverted. And there, everyone expressed emotions, spoke, danced… danced; everything was said openly. That’s why I think we were hooked, that’s why we were  so hooked, because it gave us courage, it gave us courage to express ourselves. We learned from soap operas. My generation learned everything from soap operas.

[Lola]: But times have changed, and Latin American soap operas are no longer what they used to be. They are still going strong, but now there are other powers: Korean ones, Turkish ones… which are even imported to Latin America. And in Romania, Turkish soap operas are the ones that dominate local television now.

Delia’s mother, who was previously unable to watch the Latin American hits because of her work, is now 60 years old and has become a fan. 

[Delia]: And when I see her in front of the TV set, so hooked, so intense, talking to the actors, I see myself as a little girl. Absorbing all of that, eating up the story. And sometimes I sit with her for ten minutes watching the Turkish soap opera, just to spend some time together. And I get the same emotion that I got as a child, and I understand that. I understand the passion.

[Lola]: But unlike what happened with Spanish, according to Delia, people have not started learning Turkish. It seems that Latin American melodramas and Romania were made for each other and came together at the perfect time. They were themes and stories that Romania wanted, and maybe even needed.

[Daniel]: Lola García-Ajofrín is a Spanish journalist currently living in Bucharest. This story was edited by Luis Fernando Vargas, Camila Segura, and me. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. Sound design is by Andrés Azpiri with music by Rémy Lozano.

Thanks to Inout Geana, Patrick Zuchowicki, and Petrisor Obae from Pagina de Media in Bucharest for their help with this episode.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Lisette Arévalo, Pablo Argüelles, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Selene Mazón, Juan David Naranjo, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramírez, Barbara Sawhill, David Trujillo, Ana Tuirán, Elsa Liliana Ulloa, and Desireé Yépez.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO. 

Radio Ambulante is a podcast by Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed on the Hindenburg PRO program.

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Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.