teaching film across languages
DESCRIPTION
A cotribution to a PMLA volume, Teaching Film, on strategies for teaching cinema as a medium in permanent state of translationTRANSCRIPT
Nataša ĎurovičováInternational Writing Program/The University of IowaPatrice Petro and Lucy Fischer eds. Teaching Film
“Teaching Film Across Languages: Cinema and Translation”
I. Overview of issues
Rare are the undergraduate film studies classes in U.S. institutions of higher (or lower) learning
in which the first screening of a subtitled film, likely preceded by the instructor’s justificatory
comment, does not bring up a groan from the auditorium. Opting for a film with a dubbed track
might meet less initial resistance but would in itself drastically reduce the repertoire of films or
DVDs available to the instructor (at least, again, in the U.S.). Like medicine, film in translation
may be good for you, Anglophone film students know, but takes some effort to take in.
But what if the affect were reversed and the process of translation, instead of being viewed as a
regrettable if unavoidable disturbance, would be tackled as an integral element of the Film
Studies curriculum? The premise of this essay is that studying the general history of cinema is
fundamentally incomplete without attending to the matter of films’ global circulation, a process
inextricably involved with translation, and spanning the silent and the sound eras alike. The
topic can be introduced either in a stand-alone class, or as a reiterated perspective inflecting a
variety of other courses (•to film theory, World Film History, genre courses such as action film or
musicals, as well as any course focused on a national cinema). In either case, however, its
relevance rests on some general theoretical assumptions:
1
•Attending to a film’s language under the sign of translation redirects the standard
historiographical paradigm from cinema as a national project toward cinema as transnational
practice. 1
The assumption that a film can circulate beyond national borders has been a factor in all phases
of production, from cinema’s very first years. Thus, in the silent period the work of title
translation complemented other forms of adaptation (most often through editing) in the post-
production for foreign-release prints: and from the earliest years of the sound era on it became
clear that a regional or an acoustically complex soundtrack would make a film more difficult to
export than the single-channel, carefully synchronized and redundant dialogue and sound
effects, combined with an illustrative music track now known as the classical model.2 More
generally, dramas of translation and its failure, that is, of geopolitical miscommunication, have
recently become common enough in the form of polylingual films like Babel or The Cuckoo or
Letters from Iwo Jima to suggest the emergence of a distinct trans-national sub-genre.3
1 See Nataša Ďurovičová, “Vector, Zone, Flow: Towards a History of Cinematic Translatio.”
Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman, eds. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives.
New York: Routledge, 2009.
2 For a meticulous study of silent-to-sound transition with emphasis on translation see Anna
Sofia Rossholm, Reproducing Languages, Translating Bodies: Approaches to Speech, Translation
and Cultural Identity in Early European Sound Film. Stockholm: Almkvist & Wiksell, 2006.
3 See Christoph Wahl, “Discovering a Genre: The Polyglot Film,” CinemaScope vol. 1,
<http://www.madadayo.it/Cinemascope_archive/cinema-scope.net/index_n1.html>
2
• In a medium with a precarious relationship to “the original,” focus on translation draws
attention to the general matter of textual variants and cinematic textuality along “philological”
lines.
Films have always been modified to adapt to geographically, politically, historically and
technologically changing environments, through re-editing, re-titling, colorization ,etc. In this
sense the work of translation is comparable, for instance, to the work of censorship, in that both
factor cinema’s fundamentally heteroglossic character, with its range of coexistent and
competing (discursive) voices.4 Similarly, the inevitable traces inflicted by dubbing or subtitling
present a challenge to critical approaches resting on assumptions of textual unity, e.g.
authorship, or for that matter to theories that assume the normative status of the classical
style. For while the graphemic or else acoustic supplement of subtitling or dubbing is meant to
be considered ‘in-different’ (that is, functionally equivalent and thus ‘invisible’) vis a vis the
original, its blatant difference cannot be denied and obviously influences a film’s reception.5
Extending this logic of difference, as relayed by recent translation theory, Marcus Nornes has
made a forceful argument ‘for an abusive subtitling,’ that is, for an attitude to subtitling that
would admit and even stress the supplementary nature of translation by formal devices of
estrangement. 6
4 This is the claim at the heart of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s indispensable essay “The
Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference, Power,” Screen 26, nos. 3–4 (1985): 35–58,
5 See for instance Nataša Ďurovičová, “Local Ghosts: Dubbing Bodies in Early Sound Cinema.” Il
film e i suoi multipli/Film and Its Multiples. Ed. Anna Antonini. Udine: Forum, 2003. 83-98.
Reprinted in Moveast 9 (2003). <http://epa.oszk.hu/00300/00375/00001/durovicova.htm>
3
• If language is what ties texts to their geopolitical origin, translation is the work of loosening
these ties to the point of rendering them arbitrary: only then can globalization (in its general
sense of extreme space compression) proceed.
As cinema adapts to its contract with digital remediation (presently in the form of the DVD but
also anticipating direct-downloads), the traditional processes of dialogue translating ion are
being upgraded to a more thoroughgoing process of localization in which not only language but
other key markers of provenance (that is, code and all other meta-data making the DVD playable
in a given region) must be rewritten for the “local” environment. 7
Depending on the course at hand, time limits and the institution’s resources, the unit on
translation and cinema could be organized in either of two distinct directions: a) as studying
the basic ground rules and practices involved with a film crossing (or failing to cross) linguistic
barriers (e.g. any national film history course), or b) as a gateway to a broader discussion in
which translation is only one, variable element in the modular system of filmmaking, and thus
points to the mutable life of film as print, circulating across space and time in different versions,
including its present, digitally remediated, format (courses on narrative theory as well as any
history-driven courses, including documentary and experimental cinema).
6 The concept’s most updated version is in Abė Markus Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating
Global Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, Chapter 5.
7 See Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2005.
4
Finally, it should be added that though a student would benefit from the knowledge of a foreign
language, it isn’t a prerequisite for either understanding the problematic or doing serious work
on this topic. For a comparison of two versions of a film--an ‘original’ and a translated version--
yields an obvious difference in the basic viewing experience, which can be described either
semiotically (on the level of the signifier--extra graphemes, sounds, asynchronicity, etc.) or
‘phenomenologically’ (different perceptual experiences of im/mediacy, of reading vs. ‘seeing,
etc.).
II. The practices of translation
1. Disciplinary boundaries: Film Studies, foreign languages and translation studies.
Over the last decade Film Studies has had an energetic, if only latent, partner in Translation
Studies proper (while the latter discipline is in turn organically interconnected with the various
language fields themselves, as well as with work in general linguistics and semiotics—bringing
film studies back to the discipline’s roots in a side-by-side study of film and language). And
from the early 1990s on, roughly coinciding with the surging consciousness of globalization that
the www brought about, a growing wing of that discipline has been devoted to the subfield of
‘audio/visual translation' (generally studying film and television). 8 While translation certainly
does not equal foreign language acquisition, it is inevitably a component in the process of
learning a language. Literature on A/V translation thus commonly tackles the disciplinary verso,
as it were, of the kinds of issues foreign-language teachers may be asking themselves as they are
deciding whether or how to use a film in their classes: how close or “faithful” are the subtitles
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to the foreign-language dialogue? Which aspects of speech do they highlight, and which do they
suppress? What is the perceptual loss and gain of a spectator listening, watching and reading
simultaneously, and ‘comparatively’?
A demonstration of what is at issue in these processes might come clear for students though a
comparison of clips from “home-language” films in which the baseline of English is dramatized
in confrontation with the quite varied deployments of “foreign speech”. Taking for instance
recent Hollywood productions such as Lost in Translation, Spanglish, Hidalgo or Letters from
Iwo Jima, a class discussion about what gets translated, and how, is an easy warm-up exercise,
letting students discover and discuss scenes when non-English dialogue offers simply acoustic
mise-en scene (i.e. when it remains, in effect, noise). This gives them an immediate opportunity
to think about the linguistic investment, the semantic stakes, the politics and the perils—even
the narrative mysteries—of translation even without any particular knowledge of a second
language. The discussion can instead lead to questions about how these films would be adapted
for distribution (theatrical, digital) in the ‘symmetrical’ linguistic region --in the cases cited,
Japanese and Spanish.9
2. Studying translation procedures
• Comparing multiple-language versions. Produced mainly from the transition-to-sound
period through the Thirties (i.e. between the Crash and the start of WWII), the foreign-language
versions demonstrate first of all the staggering amount of linguistic and cultural reinterpretation
9 The pervasive thematization of translation in recent cinema is the major concern of Michael
Cronin, Translation Goes to the Movies , New York: Routledge, 2008.
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deemed necessary for successful international distribution and exhibition once sync sound came
in. They also instructively highlight the genealogy of sound norms, some of which still remain
central to our understanding of the representation of the body.10
Many DVDs now collate such versions into what might be called an “original edition.” These
include, for instance, both the German and the English-language release version of UFA’s 1931
Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel, MGM’s 1931 German-and English-language versions of Anna
Christie, a collated English and Spanish version of various Laurel and Hardy features, or G.W.
Pabst’s adaptation of Brecht’s Three Penny Opera as Dreigroschenoper as well as Opéra de
quat’sous. Playing both versions in their entirety (with the foreign language version’s English
subtitles on, when necessary), then running two selected corresponding scenes simultaneously
on side-by-side monitors (the foreign-language version with the subtitles now off and the
volume up a bit, the better to register differences and nuances of voice) never fails to generate a
good class discussion. Such straightforward comparison may then open up to a discussion of
possible cultural connotations and formal distinctions latently sorting under the rubric “national
cinema features”: how to make sense of a slightly faster editing pace in the French as opposed
to the German version of the Pabst film? How to interpret—or whether to interpret at all—the
difference of costume Garbo is wearing in the German version versus the American version of
Anna Christie? etc., etc.
• Polyglot films and subtitles. Running deliberately counter to the paradigm of a
national cinema with its privileged relationship to national language and literature is a world
cinema current that seeks to embody the cinematic institution’s inherent cosmopolitanism. In
this distinct current, films are polyglot, geopolitically decentered, speaking in more than one
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language and using this tension as both a form of expression and of substance: the clashes of
the various languages, and the characters’ mutual comprehensibility, or lack thereof, are here
an essential part of the plot itself.
Historically this practice was, it should be said, an exception. The 1931 bilingual Kameradschaft
stands as a thematic and political touchstone of the left-wing internationalist policies virtually
demanding such use of film language; and the famous four–language-cross-talking projection
room scene in Godard’s 1964 Le mépris was clearly intended as a parable for the total schism
modernism brought to cinema. But today, as themes of migration, exile, and diaspora become
pervasive in movies (partly reflecting the cultural and economic realities of new transnational
state formations such as the EU), and as blockbusters look to maximize global revenue by
courting a transnational rather than a national market as their baseline (e.g. Warners’ “poly-
Asian” Memoirs of a Geisha ) , the clash of languages is becoming a recurrent trope.11 Three
excellent recent examples among many are The Cuckoo ( Russia, dir. Aleksandr Rogozhkin,
2002) , Le grand voyage (France, dir. Ismaël Ferrouki, 2004) and Divine Intervention
(France/Morocco/Germany/Palestine, dir. Elie Suleiman, 2002), each built around the basic
premise of people dependent on one another without being able to speak each other’s
language. This discursive structure renders subtitles, of course, as moot as they are
indispensible, for their work is precisely to level and so effectively undo the gap in
comprehension.
• Finally, the third vexed film translation strategy is dubbing. It is only by teaching
dubbing as a topic in and of itself (rather than lapsing back onto the commonplace that it as a
painful but inevitable semi-obstruction of the original dialogue) that we can directly address the
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peculiar and potent asymmetry known as the “American exception,” and its profound
consequences.
As in most matters of film sound, the ground rules of the global translation were put into place
during the transition-to-sound years (1927-1931). Though the cost of subtitles was generally
only about a tenth of that of a dubbed version, the insertion of a text over the image was not
only tainted by its link to the just-outdated silents; even more importantly distributors deemed
that dialogue as mediated by writing presented an absolute obstacle to reaching the often
incompletely literate world audiences. By and large it is fair to say that only countries at once
too small to recoup the cost of dubbing, but with a very high level of literacy were deemed
suitable for subtitles: the first instances were Scandinavia and the Netherlands (with France,
giving in to pressure by a mix of domestic and foreign distributors by only allowing the so-called
versions originales with subtitles in a dozen or so art et essai cinemas nation-wide).
Whether that decision was driven by the audiences or by the distributors’ fiat remains open to
debate . In effect, however, dubbing became the principal mediating channel for the mass
distribution of imported films in most of the world’s big markets (e.g. Italy, Germany, Japan,
France, China, USSR/Russia, India, etc.); in the U.S., meanwhile, this translation strategy has
been accepted as aesthetically off limits by the critics as well as the trade press. Whatever the
formal merit of this stance, it has since the 1930s performed the job of a stylistic fig leaf for the
monopoly grip of Hollywood’s vertically integrated industry on US theatre screens. With the
“dubbing=bad” axiom as a foundation(the traditional audience opinion supposedly being that
noticing lip-synch destroys the illusion of reality, while the basic cinephile argument being that
by replacing the performer’s own voice, dubbing makes it impossible to experience the film as it
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would be by the domestic spectator), imported films have almost always been practically
excluded from the US mass market. In turn, however, the material elements of the imports
(plot, or characters, or music) were often quite well received in the US in the form of (non-
translated) “originals” known as remakes: examples range from virtual shot-by–shot replications
such as Intermezzo (Sweden 1936)/ Intermezzo: A Love Story (USA, 1939) and Pepé le Moko
(France, 1937)/ Algiers (USA, 1938),or Au bout de souffle (France, 1960) to Breathless (USA,
1983), to looser calques a la The Ring (USA, 2002) of Ringu (Japan, 1998). Meanwhile, the
minoritizing effect of subtitles-- the literal mark of difference in U.S. imports--only confirms the
central and fixed bias in favor of the American cultural product as the norm.12
Discussion of “the dubbing difference” can be started off with the basic estrangement exercise
of showing a DVD edition of a classical Hollywood film in a dubbed version (accompanied by
English subtitles if needed). John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941), screened with
Spanish-language dialogue, for instance, invites at once a comparison of the acoustic remixing of
the two versions, a discussion of the corporeal “aura” a particular voice and a given language
performs for the human figure and for a fictional character, and can also open up on a
comparison of (the English) subtitles vs. the original dialogue track. In other words, the question
to the students becomes: what is it the audiences in dubbing countries have been watching and
listening to for these past eight decades if not the ‘perfect’ original soundtrack of imported
films? Does it matter? And if not, why is it so impossible for US audiences to do the same?
Alternately, with their unique sound aesthetic, characterized by a soundtrack generated entirely
in post-production, most Italian films are fundamentally amenable to, and compatible with,
dubbing. Replaying the same scene of, say, Amarcord with its original soundtrack and its English
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dub makes apparent how relatively similar they are in their ‘equidistant’ reverb and thus post-
synced quality. It is this “detachable” soundtrack that made possible the wild hybridity, and
thereby exportability, of for instance, spaghetti westerns–a strategy sharing some features with
Bollywood’s heightened stylization via post-production sound.
3. Remediation: film translation in the digital environments
Finally, translation opens up yet another path of inquiry inside film studies, one that stretches
beyond the concerns of language narrowly defined. For language also functions as a tracking
device through which it is possible to follow the vagaries and politics of remediation in the
service of making a film go truly global. What changes follow, in other words, when the images
and sounds previously stored on acetate and on reels have been replaced—remediated--by
digitized discs with their plethora of new functions, huge capacities of extra storage, and near-
infinite reproducibility?13
13 One gloss of remediation is: “If we want to describe what new media does to old media with
a single term, ‘mapping’ is a good candidate. Software allows us to remap old media objects into
new structures - turning media into 'meta-media.' [. . .] In contrast to media, meta-media
acquires three new properties. First, with software, data can be translated into another domain
- time into 2D space, 2D image into 3D space, sound into 2D image, and so on. […] Second,
media objects can be manipulated using GUI (Graphical User Interface) techniques such as:
move, transform, zoom, multiple views, filter, summarize. […] And third, media objects can now
be 'processed' using standard techniques of computerized data processing; search, sort, replace,
etc. media objects can now be ‘processed.’” Lev Manovich, “Understanding Meta-Media”
CTheoryNet http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=493#_edn1#_edn1.
11
A first ready way of tracking these mutations is to chart the addition of languages as they follow,
or else deviate from, the region codes regulating the global release patterns of DVDs: what are
the pathways and the language supplements of an American film when a distributor releases it
on a Region 2 DVD, for instance—given that this region comprises a dozen nation-states, at the
very least? 14 Does every country gets its own language? And when a film is released on DVD
accompanied by one or several translation tracks, how deep does its translation scheme reach—
i.e. does it include director comments, bonus materials, etc? How would the reception of, say, a
Brazilian film in the US be affected if all the extra materials remain in Portuguese? Inversely,
what are the decisions involved in translating or not translating the complex supplement of
materials on the various “Special Edition” Hollywood blockbusters released in several dozens of
world markets on the same day? These are now questions aiming less at translation in the
sense of a process for achieving comprehension; rather, translation here becomes a caliper of
sorts, a way of gauging the degree of a film’s “localization” -- that is, measuring just how
noticeable the cultural distance between a film’s provenance and its reception remains. A film
(like other kinds of software—e.g. video games) is said to be fully localized when the
viewer/consumer simply doesn’t perceive the text as in any sense ‘foreign,” or “alien,” marked
by translation.
But the latent global distribution network that the www provides for cinema in its digitized
version also provides an infrastructure that is distinct and separate from the DVD disc itself.
Though a film may not have been translated for the commercial exhibition circuit, it can
nonetheless be possible to find downloadable, often “home-made” full-length translations in
the form of peer-to-peer file sharing sites, offering a kind of para-legal linguistic companion for
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the film—a protocol that in turn may allow a multitude of local receptions much more
comprehensive than any multiplex ever would. Similarly the “fan-subbing” flourishing in
conjunction with Japanese anime has spawned technologies and software making it readily
possible for anyone to subtitle their own anime (clip) and post it on YouTube. As the various
automated translation sites proliferate, ranging from generic cut-and-paste windows inside
search engines like Google and Yahoo through somewhat more specialized sites
(e.g.<www.animelab.com>) so do the prospects grow of “dragging” almost any film across any
linguistic boundary. Locating and studying this culture of film appropriation via a linguistic tool
may be among the more popular class assignments.
The unique hieroglyphic mix of image, sound, and word that characterizes cinema has in effect
been a stealth translator machine for many decades in the service of an easy and pervasive
Anglophony. A thought experiment in which one imagines that the bulk of the world’s cinema
for the last 80 years has been in, say, Chinese, instantly illuminates the far-reaching and
profound consequences of this moving hieroglyph’s effect, and the many reasons for studying it.
Works Cited
Ian Balfour and Atom Egoyan, eds. Subtitles: On the Foreigness of Film. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 2005
Cronin, Michael. Translation and Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Cronin, Michael. Translation Goes to the Movies . New York: Routledge, 2008.
Ďurovičová, Nataša. “Local Ghosts: Dubbing Bodies in Early Sound Cinema.” Il film e i suoi multipli/Film and Its Multiples. Ed. Anna Antonini. Udine: Forum, 2003. 83-98. Reprinted in Moveast 9 (2003). <http://epa.oszk.hu/00300/00375/00001/durovicova.htm>
13
Ďurovičová, Nataša. “Vector, Flow, Zone: Towards a History of Cinematic Translatio.” Ďurovičová, Nataša and Kathleen Newman, eds. World Cinemas, Transnational Practices. New York: Routledge, 2009. 90-120.
Gambier, Yves and Henrik Gottlieb, eds. (Multi)Media Translation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2001.
Kayahara, Matthew. “The Digital Revolution: DVD Technology and the Possibilities for Audio-Visual Translation,” The Journal of Specialized Translation 3 (2005). <http://www.jostrans.org/issue03/issue03_toc.php>.
Manovich, Lev. “Understanding Meta-media.” < CTheoryNet http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=493#_edn1#_edn1 >
Nornes, Markus Abe. Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
8 See for instance Yves Gambier and Henrik Gottlieb, eds. (Multi)Media Translation. Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 2001.
11 Mark Betz proposes subtitled polylinguality as a central feature of “European Art Cinema” in
Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009. See also note 2 (above).
12 See for instance John Mowitt, “ The Hollywood Sound Tract.” Subtitles: On the Foreigness of
Film. Ian Balfour and Atom Egoyan, eds. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 2005.
14 The DVD Region map is at < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_codes>
For a discussion of this aspect of digitalization see Matthew Kayahara, “The Digital Revolution:
DVD Technology and the Possibilities for Audio-Visual Translation,” The Journal of Specialized
Translation 3 (2005). <http://www.jostrans.org/issue03/issue03_toc.php>.
14
Rossholm, Anna Sofia. Reproducing Languages, Translating Bodies: Approaches to Speech, Translation and Cultural Identity in Early European Sound Film. Stockholm: Almkvist & Wiksell, 2006.
Stam, Robert and Ella Shohat. ”The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference,Power,” Screen 26, nos. 3–4 (1985): 35–58.
Wahl, Christoph. “Discovering a Genre: The Polyglot Film,” CinemaScope vol. 1. <http://www.madadayo.it/Cinemascope_archive/cinema-scope.net/index_n1.html>
Films Cited:
Algiers. dir. John Cromwell. MGM, 1937. Anna Christie dir. Jacques Feyder. MGM, 1930. DVD Warner Home Video, 2005.Au bout de souffle. dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Beauregard/SNC,1960.Breathless. dir. Joe McBride. Paramount, 1983.Babel. dir. Alejander Gonzalez Iñarritu. Paramount, 2006.Der blaue Engel / The Blue Angel dir. Josef von Sternberg. UFA, 1930. DVD Kino on Video. 2001.Dreigroschenoper / Opéra de quat’sous dir. G.W. Pabst. Nero Films,1931. DVD Criterion Collection, 2007.The Cuckoo dir. Aleksandr Rogozhkin. Kinokompania STV 2002. Hidalgo dir. Joe Johnston. Touchstone Pictures, 2004. How Green Was My Valley. dir. John Ford. 20th C Fox, 1941. DVD 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2001. Intermezzo. dir. Gustaf Molander. SF, 1936.Intermezzo: A Love Story. dir. George Ratoff. Selznick/UA, 1939.Letters from Iwo Jima. dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Brothers, 2006.Lost In Translation. dir. Sofia Coppola. Universal Pictures, 2003. Memoirs of a Geisha. dir. Rob Marshall. Warner Brothers, 2005.The Ring. dir. Gore Verbinski. Dreamworks, 2002.Ringu. dir. Hideo Nakata. Toho, 1998.Spanglish. dir. James L. Brooks. Columbia Pictures, 2004.
10 See three special issues of the journal Cinema & Cie, no. 4 (Spring 2004), no.6 (Spring 2005)
and no. 7 (Fall 2005) on this topic.
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