When you ask Olenka Polak why she launched her new app, she’ll tell you that she just wanted to watch movies with her parents.
Polak’s parents are immigrants from Poland, and English-language films and television shows baffled them. But then they saw the Spongebob Movie: Sponge out of Water in their native Polish. That changed everything.
“They asked us, ‘This is what you were watching your entire childhood?’” Polak says. “‘Now we understand it. The humor is so weird!’”
Polak says they were finally laughing at the same jokes, at the same time, and nobody had to translate anything. It was just your typical night out at the movies, except for the fact that Polak’s parents were wearing headphones plugged into their smartphones.
They were using myLINGO, the app that Polak launched with her brother Adam. Currently in beta testing, it lets you access movie audio tracks in other languages. It will officially launch later this summer in the App Store and on Android.
Isn’t using your phone in a theater going to irritate others in the audience? Already taken care of, says Polak. Your camera won’t be accessible, and the screen will go dark during the movie so that the glare won’t disturb those around you.
The company was founded in 2012, when Polak was just 18. The idea caught on quickly, winning the Harvard Innovation Challenge the next year. She dropped out of the prestigious college during her third year in order to focus on building the app.
Her hard work paid off: myLINGO has raised $4 million in funding from investors.
One of the first things the team did was become members at Santa Monica’s WeWork Promenade, moving out of a cramped space in their chairman’s office.
So, what’s the story behind myLINGO? Hollywood studios dub their films into a minimum of four languages: French, Italian, German, and Spanish. But for films that they expect to be worldwide blockbusters, they dub them in up to 35 languages.
“As long as the studio has dubbed into another language,” says Polak, “we can support it on our app.”
They have had meetings with all the major studios, explaining how they could be making money off the audio tracks they had already produced. The technology developed by myLINGO’s “all-star team” makes sure the sound is perfectly synchronized.
“Basically, we asked Hollywood to take another look at how they use their audio tracks,”says Polak. “We told them, ‘Hey, there are Italian speakers all over the world. Make your dubbed audio tracks available to everyone, no matter where they are. People will pay to have access.’”
The company just signed a deal with Disney to support their studio releases on the app. And they are in talks with other studios as well.
Polak is already looking ahead, making plans for turning myLINGO into a “global company.” After all, there are people in every country who’d be more comfortable watching a movie in another language.
One thing she’s not mulling over, however, is what her next business idea might be. She’s having too much fun with myLINGO.
“I’m not having any thoughts about starting a new company,” she says. “It’s something not in my headspace at all.”
Photos: Tom Bender