Monday, February 02, 2004
One of the main movie distributors in Argentina decided to stop using subtitles in favour of dubbing. Their movies are mainly teenage-oriented, and the company alleges that young people in Argentina are no longer able to read or follow them. Despite the outrageous education failure that prevents those people to cope with short text sentences parading in the lower section of the screen, the very idea of dubbing is dreadful. Once I learned that in most non-English speaking countries dubbing is preferred to subtitles, I knew that subtitling in Argentina would have a limited life. Perhaps objections like that of Borges stopped the invasion back in their beginnings:
The art of combination is not infinite in its possibilities, though those possibilities are apt to be frightening. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with the head of a lion, the head of a dragon, and the head of a goat; the second-century theologians, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are inextricably linked; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a bright red, supernatural bird equipped with six feet and six wings but with neither face nor eyes; nineteenth-century geometrists, the hypercube, a four-dimensional figure enclosing an infinite number of cubes and bounded by eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this frivolous museum of teratology: by means of a perverse artifice they call dubbing, they devise monsters that combine the famous face of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo. How can we fail to proclaim our admiration for this bleak magic, for these ingenious audio-visual deformations?
Borges wrote this in 1945, and we were proud for many years to enjoy movies in their original language (I even had a humble contribution myself to this healthy tradition by subtitling part of the Seinfeld series). I always thought that most Argentineans preferred this, but now I learn the opposite: 50% wants dubbing, while only 28% wants subtitling. The rest remained undecided or had no preference at all, which means that dubbing is not a problem for them. The statistics for the rest of Latin America is even more frightening. Even among those who understands perfectly spoken English, there's a 21% who preferred dubbing.
Now, there are several things that can be said against dubbing. The most basic one is that of the substitution, already noted by Borges in that article:
Those who defend dubbing might argue (perhaps) that objections to it can also be raised against any kind of translation. This argument ignores, or avoids, the principal defect: the arbitrary implant of another voice and another language. The voice of Hepburn or Garbo is not accidental but, for the world, one of their defining features.
Then he asks when will the system be perfect at last, so we had the whole substitution: voice and image, instead of having only half of an actor (his voice) replaced. The actor acts with his body, but mainly with his voice; some movies are not much more than a show of actors. How to replace them by third rate actors, those who do the dubbing?
Another thing is the awareness of a different culture. Ruby Rich, from the University of California, Berkeley, spoke about this in the American context:
Subtitles acknowledge that our language, the language of this place in which we are watching this film, is only one of many languages in the world, and that at that very same moment, elsewhere they are watching movies in which characters speak in English while other languages spell out their thoughts and emotions across the bottom of the frame for other audiences. It gives me hope.
Some might argue that subtitling is good when you already know the spoken language, but that's a false argument. When I see, say, an Iranian movie, I enjoy the local colour of the movie, and one of the attributes of that local colour is, naturally, the foreign language. If you happen to speak a related language (any Indo-European language in my case), the auditive appreciation of an unexpected ethymology is a welcome happiness. Some people said that the most significant trait of a culture is the language, so to replace one language with another is to falsify the whole culture implied in a movie.
Finally, for the specific case of Spanish dubbing, there's the arbitrary use of a "neutral" language, that not only implies a language theoretically spoken by the whole Latin America, but an equally common accent. So here we have two cultural subtitutions: the foreign language substituted, and the local language as well.
---
Subtitles are not a perfect system either, and shares some common problems with dubbing. In the end, the translator has us in his hand. Henri Behar, subtitler for the French market, noted once:
Whoever transcribed the dialogue of Gus van Sant?s Drugstore Cowboy was probably partly deaf (at best) and definitely puritan: anything that had to do with the fuck word was transcribed as "inaudible." A sentence, therefore, might read: "(inaudible) you, you (inaudible) piece of (inaudible)! Where did you put the (inaudible) stash??
So the translator usually exerts an originally non-existent censorship over the movie. The lack of common curse words for a vast linguistic area as Latin America is makes the problem of fidelity even more difficult. Finally, there's the incompetence. In Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise is driving a car with some friend. He wants to hear some music, so he takes some CD and asks his friend: "Radiohead?". The local translation read "Headphones?".
The art of combination is not infinite in its possibilities, though those possibilities are apt to be frightening. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with the head of a lion, the head of a dragon, and the head of a goat; the second-century theologians, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are inextricably linked; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a bright red, supernatural bird equipped with six feet and six wings but with neither face nor eyes; nineteenth-century geometrists, the hypercube, a four-dimensional figure enclosing an infinite number of cubes and bounded by eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this frivolous museum of teratology: by means of a perverse artifice they call dubbing, they devise monsters that combine the famous face of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo. How can we fail to proclaim our admiration for this bleak magic, for these ingenious audio-visual deformations?
Borges wrote this in 1945, and we were proud for many years to enjoy movies in their original language (I even had a humble contribution myself to this healthy tradition by subtitling part of the Seinfeld series). I always thought that most Argentineans preferred this, but now I learn the opposite: 50% wants dubbing, while only 28% wants subtitling. The rest remained undecided or had no preference at all, which means that dubbing is not a problem for them. The statistics for the rest of Latin America is even more frightening. Even among those who understands perfectly spoken English, there's a 21% who preferred dubbing.
Now, there are several things that can be said against dubbing. The most basic one is that of the substitution, already noted by Borges in that article:
Those who defend dubbing might argue (perhaps) that objections to it can also be raised against any kind of translation. This argument ignores, or avoids, the principal defect: the arbitrary implant of another voice and another language. The voice of Hepburn or Garbo is not accidental but, for the world, one of their defining features.
Then he asks when will the system be perfect at last, so we had the whole substitution: voice and image, instead of having only half of an actor (his voice) replaced. The actor acts with his body, but mainly with his voice; some movies are not much more than a show of actors. How to replace them by third rate actors, those who do the dubbing?
Another thing is the awareness of a different culture. Ruby Rich, from the University of California, Berkeley, spoke about this in the American context:
Subtitles acknowledge that our language, the language of this place in which we are watching this film, is only one of many languages in the world, and that at that very same moment, elsewhere they are watching movies in which characters speak in English while other languages spell out their thoughts and emotions across the bottom of the frame for other audiences. It gives me hope.
Some might argue that subtitling is good when you already know the spoken language, but that's a false argument. When I see, say, an Iranian movie, I enjoy the local colour of the movie, and one of the attributes of that local colour is, naturally, the foreign language. If you happen to speak a related language (any Indo-European language in my case), the auditive appreciation of an unexpected ethymology is a welcome happiness. Some people said that the most significant trait of a culture is the language, so to replace one language with another is to falsify the whole culture implied in a movie.
Finally, for the specific case of Spanish dubbing, there's the arbitrary use of a "neutral" language, that not only implies a language theoretically spoken by the whole Latin America, but an equally common accent. So here we have two cultural subtitutions: the foreign language substituted, and the local language as well.
---
Subtitles are not a perfect system either, and shares some common problems with dubbing. In the end, the translator has us in his hand. Henri Behar, subtitler for the French market, noted once:
Whoever transcribed the dialogue of Gus van Sant?s Drugstore Cowboy was probably partly deaf (at best) and definitely puritan: anything that had to do with the fuck word was transcribed as "inaudible." A sentence, therefore, might read: "(inaudible) you, you (inaudible) piece of (inaudible)! Where did you put the (inaudible) stash??
So the translator usually exerts an originally non-existent censorship over the movie. The lack of common curse words for a vast linguistic area as Latin America is makes the problem of fidelity even more difficult. Finally, there's the incompetence. In Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise is driving a car with some friend. He wants to hear some music, so he takes some CD and asks his friend: "Radiohead?". The local translation read "Headphones?".
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