Essay: On Translation in Cinema

There was a certain elegance to the way it was handled in silent films. You avoided words, because words meant intertitles, and intertitles meant the illiterates would be left out. Then, with the rise of sound, came the rise of dubbing.

Whether your film school's sound class made it explicit or not, all modern movie sound recording techniques are built around the premise that someone, somewhere, is going to re-record the dialogue. Distributors are very clear about this. A film's soundtrack gets delivered to them in two parts: 1) dialogue 2) music & effects.

To create this sync separation requires a Herculean effort that doesn't always work. Read more...Hollywood actors know it is a given that will have to do ADR, Automated Dialogue Replacement, in a little booth somewhere months after the production has wrapped. If the acoustics of the beach scene seem odd, that's because the crashing waves couldn't be separated from the dialogue and both were recreated.

A number of elements have converged to get me thinking about how a film recorded in one language is a fundamentally different film than its translation. A scene in Rain in the Mountains has Native American Eric Smallhouse seeking advice from the wise elder Wapati, who "doesn't speak any English." Eric doesn't understand what Wapati is saying, but doesn't want to let on to his son. So he translates what he thinks Wapati is saying. Watching the scene at rehearsals, it occurs to me that someone walking in, innocent of the joke, would never know the scene is comedic. The joke is created in post-production, when subtitles will be added to reveal that the words Eric is translating as great wisdom are really a rather mundane conversation.

On the same day we rehearsed the Wapati mis-translation scene, I happened to be reading A Mouthful of Air by Anthony Burgess, a series of essays on language. In one, he discusses the art of dubbing, and how good dubbing translations match the lip movements of the actors, giving the illusion they are actually speaking an entirely different language. This is not accomplished without great poetic licence:

A typical dubber's nightmare would occur if, say, one of the key episodes in a French film consisted of a hero's reciting the first stanza of Baudelaire's "L'Albatros" in a close shot:

     Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
     Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers...

The script in straight translation would give: "Sometimes, to amuse themselves, the men of a ship's crew grab albatrosses, huge seabirds." Would any of these words fit the mouth of the reciter? Only "albatrosses," singularized to a vocable virtually identical with the original. What phrase could contain it--"grab a tame albatross"? The lip movement at the beginning of prennent is highly visible, as is the one the end of "tame." Try "dazed albatross." Try, taking the last syllables of équipage, "play pranks on a dazed albatross." Comple the second line: "vast-winged hoverer." The 'i' and the 'v' do not match the French lip positions. Try "vast white lord of the air." There is nothing in English to explain the pout on mers. "Vast white-eyed dreamer" is eccentric but seems to fit. To put Baudelaire into a film is eccentric anyway. The whole thing might be rendered as:

     At sea, for pastime, see sailors who brutally play
     Pranks on a dazed albatross, vast white-eyed dreamer.

This is in accordance with nearly all mouth positions in the French, but the problems of making the words sound like poetry and, when the next two lines come, finding rhymes, are as devastating as the reader will imagine--also time consuming. It is not surprising that a lot of cinematic dubbing represents a mere approximation to matching exotic mouth positions with native sounds.

A complete translation is not always necessary to match lips. One of my favorite dubbed scenes is in the Spanish version of In & Out, which I watched on Spanish t.v. when I was an exchange student. In the Spartacus-like climax, all the townsfolk stand up in support of Kevin Kline's teacher, declaring one by one: "Yo soy gay!" My Spanish family couldn't understand why I found the lack of translation so funny; it was a natural solution to the problem that none of the Spanish synonyms for 'gay' are one syllable. In a movie where every other word is 'gay,' context soon resolves the meaning.¹

So we have a Procrustian dilemma. Dubbing to fit the lips of the actors means stretching the words out or cutting them short. Add to that robbing the actors of their great instrument, the voice, as in Burgess' fine example: "Humprey Bogart not only had a distinctive vocal style but also a slight labial paralysis that imparted a lisping quality to his lip consonants." No dubber can do Bogey like Bogey did Bogey.

The alternative, subtitles, fails on the front that it constantly pulls the viewer's attention to the edges of the frame, distracting from the visuals. In communities with multiple languages, subtitles can take up half the screen. (Dubbing in these communities, of course, limits the commercial prospects of each film print.)

All of these factors have influenced editing. Hollywood shoots lots of 'coverage' because, by cutting to a reaction shot or behind the head of the speaker, anything can be dubbed into their mouth. Present day films are far more likely to show reaction shots than early talkies, with one important exception. On of the ways in which low budget indies save money (see Primer or El Mariachi) is by not shooting coverage. It is a calculated risk that doesn't always work out. But it has worked out enough that a lack of reaction shots has become part of the low budget aesthetic.

There is a third way, suggested by this morning's New York Times article about the revival of Jacques Tati's My Uncle:

When Jacques Tati's comic masterpiece "Mon Oncle" opened in New York City on Nov. 3, 1958, it was presented in two versions: patrons of the Baronet Theater could see "Mon Oncle" with English subtitles, while at the Guild patrons could see "My Uncle," a substantially different version of the film prepared by Tati for English-speaking audiences.

...

Though "My Uncle" doesn't fully qualify as an independent work, it does represent a thorough rethinking of "Mon Oncle."

A first viewing suggests dozens of variations between the two films. Most obviously, Tati reshot several scenes, using English signs - "School," "Way Out" - instead of the French "École" and "Sortie." But there are many other, more subtle differences: entire sequences appear in one version but not the other, and scenes are shot and edited for different effect.

With remake rights to hit t.v. show Desperate Housewives being sold to the highest Spanish speaking bidder (yes, it will be called Esposas Desesperadas), J-horror cribbing, and even Brit hits like The Office getting 'translated' into the American vernacular, it seems that the third way is gaining momentum.

Gone are the days when Spanish-speaking stars came into the studios at night to film Spanish language versions of movies on the same sets that Anglos used during the day. But they may soon return.

Is a new era of massively parallel cinema upon us? Which movie, after all, is the true version of "Mon Oncle"? Is it some combination of both the English and French versions? The fastidious Tati, it seems, has bequethed us dueling 'director's cuts'. Will future detail-oriented directors supervise each language's idiomatic edition, or will they declare that, for example, Citizen Kane is only Citizen Kane when it is played in English?

In geometry, a 'translation' leaves us with a mirror image of the original shape. The screen upon which movies are projected are a mirror too, but one that distorts spoken language even as it leaves the visuals untouched. In our multilingual world, cinema has yet to regain its early status as a universal language. Perhaps solace can be found in the fact that we are all watching different movies, whether or not they have been translated. Each of us brings our history -- cinematic, cultural, personal -- into the theater with us. My Citizen Kane is no more Orson Welles' Citizen Kane than it is the Citizen Kane of the man dubbing Orson Welles.

There's a certain irony that a medium of translation, one that turns reality into a long strip of chemicals or digits and then reassembles it anew, has such difficulty translating human speech. We can bottle reality but we can't prevent the fizz of language from steaming out. We can share images, even music & effects, but are forced to leave a gap of faith where the words should be. Sound cinema is a cinema of goodwill. A filmmaker can only hope that the audience is willing to fill the lacunae left by what is lost in translation.

1. Because of our cultural hegemony, there is not an established dubbing tradition in the English-speaking world. Still, good examples can be found. Compare the subtitled and dubbed versions on the DVDs of Das Boot or Princess Mononoke.

Bogart photo source, Star Wars photo source