Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

We had sweat, toil, and tears
For more than forty bloody years
Now we’re back to square one
For whom was it all done?

11. Isogrammatical lines (21 × 4)

Blood sweat and tears
Over forty long years
Now it’s utterly over
Who stole the clover?

12. Sounded out in Chinese

Xin xin ku ku si shi nian
yi zhao hui dao jie fang qian
ji ran hui dao jie fang qian
dang nian ge ming you wei shui

What’s been done in the later versions of this translation is to exploit the flexibility of English to simulate artificially the patterned visual effect of a script whose appearance naturally represents patterned sound. Counting characters and spaces along the line isn’t usually considered a translator’s task, but it’s really just one variant of the need in a whole variety of fields to make words fit shapes.

Strip cartoons are not redrawn when they are translated, and of the four-color plates used, only the black-and-white one with the lettering is remade for international sales. The cartoon translator has to make his version fit physically into the bubble spaces left blank by the three other plates. A very small amount of flexibility is provided by being able to alter the size of hand-drawn lettering—but limits are set by the requirement of legibility. The cartoon translator also has very little freedom to move meanings around between frames, since the captions must fit the picture, right down to the details of what the depicted characters are doing with their arms and hands. If you thought translating Proust might be difficult, just try Astérix:

The “Breton” cousin of the Gaulish heroes speaks a parody of schoolbook English in French, with word-for-word renderings of “I say,” “a bit of luck,” and “shake hands.” Moreover, his name, Jolitorax, is a pun on “fair chest,” “pretty thorax,” which is not remotely funny in English. The translator Anthea Bell deftly reinstates the caricatural nature of the representation of English in French by inserting “Oh” and “old boy,” and she substitutes a rather better pun of her own for the name. Doing all that within the confines of a physical space that can take only so many letters makes this translation an exploit, a victory over language itself. But only slightly lesser feats are performed every day by professionals and amateurs the world over who translate Japanese manga into English or Belgian graphic novels into Portuguese, and so on. Graphic translation is much bigger business than literary fiction and probably rivals the translation of cookbooks in volume and turnover. Studying translated captions of works of this kind is an education in the flexibility of human languages and human minds. Nothing ever fits easily, but in the end a really surprising amount of form and content can be made to fit external 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.