Gregory Warner

Gregory Warner is the host and creator of Rough Translation, an NPR podcast with “stories from far off places that hit close to home.” Follow Gregory on Twitter here. Follow Rough Translation on Twitter here.

How did you get introduced to the audio space? Have you always loved it, before podcasting?
“Act V,” an episode by Jack Hitt on This American Life. I must have listened to long-form radio before then but that episode was really my introduction and my gateway drug. A lot of that has to do with the particular place I was at in life. After college I’d taken a series of odd jobs, ending with an assignment to visit all of the medium- and maximum-security prisons in New York State and write a report on the condition of prisoners with mental illness. The person who gave me that job had met me teaching writing on Rikers’ Island, and felt that I had a relaxed manner with inmates and could draw them out. The prison visits were eye-opening, but the report-writing was harder than I’d expected, and I soon fell behind deadline. I started coming in to the office on Saturdays to get in a few extra hours of work undisturbed.

All that is to say, one Saturday morning I was in the office working on my report while listening to WNYC. This was before podcasting. Plain old radio. Jack Hitt’s voice came on. If you haven’t heard that episode, check it out. It’s great storytelling on many levels, but I think what hooked me is that the distance between what Jack had been doing that year and I was doing didn’t seem insurmountable. He’d spent months in a high-security prison in Missouri. I was spending my time visiting high-security prisons in New York. He was talking to inmates, hearing their stories. I was too. Not long after, I did my This American Life story -- from a Missouri correctional facility.

I think it’s really important not just to fall in love with something but to have some way to imagine yourself doing it. My path to podcasts was through prison.

How is a Rough Translation story born?
Since the pandemic, we’ve been having regular Zoom meetings with NPR’s international correspondents. Some RT stories are born there, out of conversations or questions. For example, our “From Niqab to N95” episode began with a conversation with my friend Elizabeth Spackman, who was wondering aloud how the coronavirus rules around mandatory facemasks were perceived by Muslim women who wear religious face coverings. Had the public health rules around covering our faces mitigated the stigma that those women feel when they walk in Western countries? I took this question to the Zoom meeting, and it turned out to be something that Eleanor Beardsley and Diaa Hadid were thinking about. I like how we did that episode because we really tried to preserve the spirit of the Zoom call conversation in the actual recording, without making it overly focused on the journalists. 

Has there been a place on the globe Rough Translation has not yet visited that you hope to?
I don’t really think of it in terms of checking boxes off a bucket list, but I would love to go back to some of the countries I covered as NPR’s East Africa correspondent, particularly Ethiopia and Eritrea.

How has Rough Translation evolved?
Our first tag line was something like “how conversations that are happening in the US are playing out in other parts of the world.” I think our latest tag line (“stories from far off places that hit close to home”) is closer to the spirit of the show. You’re going to hear stories that feel relevant to your life, but that relevance might sneak up on you as opposed to being part of the overt framing. 

What's a story that resonated with people so much that it surprised you?
“Liberty, Equality, and French Fries” is about a fight by some McDonalds employees in a poor, mostly immigrant neighborhood of Marseilles, France to save their restaurant. The stakes of the story are relatively small, but the story touches on bigger things like what is a job really supposed to mean and what happens when people take corporate catchphrases close to heart. Oh, and also the good and bad of American-style capitalism. I feel like that story resonated with an incredibly wide range of people. 

Fill in the blank: You will like Rough Translation if you _______.
You will like Rough Translation if you have to pause when people ask you the question, “Where are you from?”

Which episode was the most fun to make?
Maybe Hotel Corona, our episode about the Jerusalem hotel that became a Covid-recovery center / real-life-reality-TV-show. Or our Ukraine series. Though on the theory that fun comes in waves and anything that takes time is bound to have significant stretches of no fun, maybe the most fun was our election episode, “All Eyes on US.” It was right after Biden won and we set ourselves a goal to hit 25 countries in 25 minutes. There was no downtime.

Can you tease us with anything exciting coming up in this or next season?
You’ll be hearing a greater variety of stuff over the next few months – more listener stories, more interviews with people around the world. We’re working on a series with correspondent Quil Lawrence (from our “War Poems” episode) that gets inside the US military in a way that I’ve never heard before.

What do you hope the show does for people?
I think we’re trying to give people something akin to a really good travel experience. Not so much of the beaches-and-museums variety but more like that time you found yourself in a random and slightly unnerving situation with strangers and ended up finding out surprising things that shifted the way you see yourself in the world.

What is your relationship with your voice and how would you describe it?
I feed it tea and hope it shows up for work.

Thanks, Gregory!