Is That a Fish in Your Ear - By Bellos, David Page 0,51

constraints of nonlinguistic (bubble size) and paralinguistic (gestural) kinds.

Subtitling is a smaller business, but the skills it engages are of the same kind. It has become conventional to regard average moviegoers as capable of reading only about fifteen characters per second; and in order to be legible on a screen as small as a television set, no more than thirty-two alphabetic characters can be displayed in a line. In addition, no more than two lines can be displayed at a time without obscuring significant parts of the image, so the subtitler has around sixty-four characters, including spaces, that can be displayed for a few seconds at most to express the key meanings of a shot or sequence in which characters may speak many more words than that. The limits are set by human physiology, average reading speeds, and the physical shape of the movie screen. It’s really amazing that it can be done at all.

A further constraint on subtitling is the convention that a subtitle may not bleed across a cut: if you have someone chatting to his neighbor on an airplane seat and then a cut to a shot of the plane landing, for example, the subtitle must disappear at or just before the cut, and the following caption may not appear before the next audio sequence begins. Consequently, a film has to be decomposed into the “spots” in which subtitling may occur. The delicate job of “spotting” (made a lot easier if the film distributor can provide a transcript of the voice track) may or may not be done by the translator hired to write the captions. Usually, at least two people are involved. It follows almost automatically from this that subtitles do not offer a translation of all the words spoken, and in particularly fast-talking films they can offer only a compression or a résumé.

Stringent formal constraints in film translation are believed to have had important retroactive effects on original work. Filmmakers dependent on foreign-language markets are well aware of how little spoken language can actually be represented in on-screen writing. Sometimes they choose to limit the volubility of their characters to make it easier for foreign-language versions to fit all the dialogue on the screen. Ingmar Bergman made two quite different kinds of films—jolly comedies with lots of words for Swedish consumption, and tight-lipped, moody dramas for the rest of the world. Our standard vision of Swedes as verbally challenged depressives is in some degree a by-product of Bergman’s success in building subtitling constraints into the composition of his more ambitious international films. It’s called the “Bergman effect,” and it can be observed in the early films of István Szabó and Roman Polanski, too.

The supposed Bergman effect in film may actually be only a “keyhole” example of a much wider modern trend. Steven Owen has argued that some contemporary poets from China, for example, write in a way that presupposes the translation of their work into English—and that all writing in foreign languages that now aspires to belong to “world literature” is built on writers’ effective internalization of translation constraints.1

Subtitling into English is a very small part of the translation world because so few foreign films are screened in the United States. At present there are only two American companies that provide subtitling services (and neither of them do only that), and they rely on a loose network of translators whose main jobs are elsewhere. Paid derisory sums at piece rates, the tiny band of English-language subtitlers are among the least-loved and least-understood language athletes of the modern media world.

In many countries, dubbing is preferred. It is rarely done into English nowadays, because American audiences insist on complete lip-synching, so that no trace remains of the foreignness of foreign-language films. To make a translation of speech such that when pronounced it matches the lip movements of the original speaker—measured in fractions of a second—is no trivial task. But it’s not only the microseconds that count. The translated dialogue is also constrained by facial gestures and movements of the body, even when those are not the customary accompaniment of the words spoken in the target language. The writers of dubbing scripts are not just athletes; they are world-class gymnasts of words—but almost never credited with their achievements in the English-speaking world.

The popularity of English-language films worldwide means that most American and British films are dubbed in multiple versions for sale abroad. Dubbing skills are much more widely used and appreciated in German, Italian, Spanish, and many other