Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

In Palestine, biblical Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language among Jews long before the Roman occupation. From perhaps as early as the fifth century B.C.E., Aramaic interpreters read out a translation of the words of the service sotto voce, just after or even while the rabbi was speaking or chanting the more ancient tongue. Eventually, the words of such Aramaic whisper translations (called chuchotage in the modern world of international interpreters) were written down, mostly in small fragments, and these targums now provide precious linguistic and historical records for scholars of Judaism. For contemporary rebroadcasts of British and American television soaps and comedy programs in Eastern and Central European languages, the targum device—low-volume voice-over translation—has been reinvented. Lectoring, as it is now called, often astounds English-language visitors to Poland or Hungary. It doesn’t make even a nod toward aural realism: a single voice speaks on behalf of all characters of both genders, and the original English-language sound remains clearly audible.

Lectoring is obviously cheaper and quicker to do than dubbing, as it requires a smaller team of translators and performers. The high volumes of English-language media imported into the smaller European countries would make it difficult to find all the linguistic trapeze artists you would need to dub everything in lip synch while the shows were still “hot.” So lectoring is a rational solution—but its underlying justification is not economic at all.

As in the synagogues of Palestine and Syria long ago, lectoring is done for people who view the original language as endowed with prestige. English is nowadays seen as a cultural asset and an object of desire. Lectoring allows English-language learners to check that they have understood correctly and to improve their English as they enjoy the film. The Hungarian viewer of The Colbert Report wants to experience authentic American comedy, and the lector—like an interpreter performing chuchotage at a high-level meeting of heads of state—serves primarily as a check on the viewer’s grasp of the real thing. How much of Colbert’s political satire can be truly grasped by a Hungarian viewer of a lectored episode is slightly beside the point: something gets through. Because the original has not been erased by translation, that something is better than naught.

Lectoring makes no attempt to fit form to form. But in a medium of much greater cultural distinction than TV and film, even the wish to do so has been derided as futile and vain. Vladimir Nabokov is famous among students of translation for his thundering assault on the folly of trying to translate rhyme by rhyme. His notorious comments accompany his own annotated translation of Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. Any attempt to reproduce the wry, light, witty, and rhythmical movement of the special form of the sonnet Pushkin used, Nabokov declared, was bound to misrepresent the poet’s true meaning and was therefore to be abhorred. Nabokov’s views on poetry translation have colored many arguments in the translation-studies field with a peculiarly vituperative tone. What he said needs to be understood in context. It is unfortunate that Nabokov put his strong opinions in such absolute and radical terms as to distract attention from the real issues.