Lost in Translation: To Sub or to Dub?

Anyone who ever had the pleasure of catching an American western on German television understands how discordant the dubbing of actors� voices can be. And anyone who attends subtitled foreign films in the U.S. recognizes that reading along can sometimes be distracting and that translations are often dubious or incomplete. To dub or to sub?

As Abe Mark Nornes notes in his book Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (published by the University of Minnesota Press), intelligent arguments have been advanced from both sides. At bottom, language will always be a barrier to fully appreciating films from linguistically foreign cultures. Even some Irish, Scottish and Jamaican movies have been subtitled for American audiences for whom the local dialect might as well be Old Norse.

One of Nornes� insights is that language was a barrier even before movies learned to talk. Silent pictures had title cards that needed translation. In many parts of the world, live translators accompanied the screening of silent films. In some area, especially Japan, the translators had distinct personalities and were stars in their own right.

A University of Michigan Asian cultural studies professor, Nornes suffers from lapses into academic dialect and fashion conscious academic theorizing. Let�s unpack his definition of the word �traffic,� as it applies to the global trafficking of movies: �In its most basic terms it points to the propelled directionality of textual sources and targets of films imagined in the built world of one language to be reimagined and reconstructed within another.� Can someone dub that into English, please? Like Soviet scholars who routinely dragged Marx and dialectical materialism into every topic, Nornes feels the need to reference Derrida and allude, without mentioning him by name, to Edward Said�s turgid critique of Orientalism. It�s a nudge to his departmental colleagues, letting them know he�s on the right side of history.

Thankfully, Nornes is often an engaging writer and frequently has interesting things to say, especially about the history of translation in movies. Cinema Babel emits the impression that in film at least, translators are never to be trusted. They may alter meaning deliberately (sometimes at the behest of government censors) or carelessly. They may reduce the poetic to the prosaic. Nornes provides a great example of the latter by contrasting a German intertitle from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to its English translation. The original, rendered in an Expressionistic font, reads: �Cesare, can you hear me? Cesare? I am calling you. I, Dr. Caligari, your master. Awaken for a blink of the eye from your dark night.� The English title card, written in plain type, scales it down to: �Wake up Cesare! I, Caligari, your master, command you!�

Cinema Babel includes fascinating accounts of the multiple language versions that were made of many early talking movies. Marlene Dietrich�s German classic Blue Angel (1930) was reshot with the cast speaking English and a few rewrites to explain why Germans would be communicating with each other in a foreign tongue. For the Spanish-language Dracula (1931), an entirely different cast stalked through the set of Tod Browning�s horror film at night with cameras rolling. It was a delicously unintended touch of vampirism�the cast and crew who only emerged after sundown. Nornes is especially good with the Japanese phenomenon of the benshi, actor-narrators who continued after the advent of sound, often rewriting the movies they translated according to their own lights. Sometimes their contributions were an improvement over the original.