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.

6

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

8

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

9

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

12

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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