Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

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.[78]

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 languages. One result of this asymmetry that is quite perceptible on-screen is that perfect lip synchronization is not always felt to be necessary by non -English-language audiences. American and Brazilian soap operas broadcast on Russian television channels frequently have voice tracks that bleed (when dialogue continues beyond the point at which the characters’ lips stop moving)—but the voices of familiar actors are characteristically those of well-known “dub stars” in the target tongue. Everyone in Germany knows the voice of “Robert De Niro,” for example, and knows also whose actual voice it is—that of Christian Brückner, a prizewinning star among audiobook readers, too, nicknamed “The Voice” in the German-language media press. Meryl Streep’s German voice is that of Dagmar Dempe, for all her films; Gabriel Byrne has been voiced by Klaus-Dieter Klebsch throughout his career since 1981. German moviegoers would be discombobulated if Russell Crowe, in his next blockbuster appearance, didn’t have the voice that really is his—that of Thomas Fritsch.[79] The French voices of Homer and Marge Simpson, Philippe Peythieux and Véronique Augereau, have their pictures in newspapers.[80] In this respect as in others, English speakers find in the language culture of almost any other country a truly foreign land.