Mystery dubbed film: WW2 film 'Behind these Walls'?

Hello gentle readers, I've been burrowing in Irish newspaper archives recently, for my own nefarious research purposes, and am a bit perplexed by something (well, more than one thing, but you know what I mean).

On 23 May 1948, Noel F. Moran, film critic of Ireland's Sunday Independent, reviewed an Anglo-French coproduction by the title Behind These Walls in his regular column 'This week's Films' (p.2). I'm unable to find any record of a film with this title, and as you will see below, he doesn't give any helpful information about actors, director etc., because he is too busy complaining about the dubbing.

I'm casting this one out to the 'verse, and would be very grateful if any readers or their acquaintances could shed any light on what the film might be. Here's what NFM says about the film:

The Anglo-French film "Behind These Walls" (Regal) is more notable as a technical experiment than as a story of the French Resistance Movement. It is, to my mind, an experiment that fails but, let me hasten to add, not on the technical side.
     The background is French: the characters are French. By means of the De Lane Lea process of English speech recording (it is known as "Lingua Synchrone"), these characters are given English voices to speak the English dialogue. Technically, as I have already implied, the process is a success. The synchronisation is a definite advance on the old hit-and-miss methods of dubbing, utilised largely on the Continent and in America. But, what has happened to the atmosphere and the realism? They have gone with the wind.
     At its best, the picture could never be regarded as another "Open City". It has not the same scope or stature, nor does it seek to give the same comprehensive survey of a great nation under the heel of the invader. Made with R.A.F. co-operation, it is a recreation of a true incident. A group of ordinary people face a tragically simple problem - whether or not to blow up a German benzine [sic] train and sacrifice the lives of 50 of their fellow countrymen, held as hostages. Emphasis is on the reactions of these hostages as they await their fate - the Mayor, outwardly calm but sick inside; the doctor; the old beggar, facing destiny philosophically; the spiv; the coward; all the unspectacular heroes and heroines of the back streets.
     The characterisation has all the visual appeal and the sensitivity one has come to associate with the French cinema - all set at nought by those English voices, which make the film neither fish, flesh nor good red herring, to to speak. The cockney-like voice of the tramp, for instance, is described in the publicity sheet as "a forthright accent that drives home the essential provincialism of the French original hero of this dramatic part". My imagination is not sufficiently vivid to catch the analogy. Give me the original French version, with English sub-titles, however inadequate. When I go to see a French film, I want to see a French film. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.

UPDATE later that evening: Warm thanks to Lucy M. and Sam B. who have solved the mystery. The film is Jericho, also known as Behind These Walls, directed by Henri Calef and released in 1946. There does appear to be some confusion about the title. The film was reviewed in the New York Times on 6 December under the title Jericho ("exultant drama in the truly fine, French tradition"). There is no mention of the translation but it seems more likely that it was the subtitled version since it played at the 55th St. Playhouse which showed a lot of subtitled imports. Jericho was also the French release title. It was reviewed twice in the Monthly Film Bulletin in the UK, on 1 January 1947 for the dubbed version under the title Behind These Walls, on 1 January 1948 for the English-subtitled version, under the title Derrière ces murs. The subtitles were referred to as 'adequate' and the dubbed version 'not too offensive'.

Image taken from http://kebekmac.blogspot.it/2015/08/calef-1946-jericho.html with thanks.

Austenland in translation

I was watching the guilty pleasure that is Austenland last night, dubbed into Italian. (I'd previously seen it in English). Austenland is a romcom about a group of misfits who sign up for an 'immersive Austen experience'. Much of the broad comedy plays on accent: Jennifer Coolidge perpetrating a series of appalling come-back-Dick-van-Dyke-all-is-forgiven outrages on received pronunciation; Georgia King channelling Miranda Richardson's Queenie; Bret McKenzie not trying particularly hard to disguise his New Zealand accent, presumably on the grounds that his employer's usual clients wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.

How can one badly fake an English accent in Italian? I wish my Italian was good enough to get a real sense of this from the dubbed version. But I could at least see how they manage the moment near the end of the film where Jane discovers that 'Lady Amelia Heartwright', played by Georgia King, is actually American too.

The English script goes more or less:

"Amelia Heartwright": Farewell! [sinking back into her seat in the carriage] God, that was the best time so far. Except for the eye gouging.
Jane: You're not British??
AH: Yeah, I know, right?! Well, that's what two years of private drama tutoring will get you.
(Austenland)

The information that Heartwright is American is only conveyed here through accent. Of course the accent doesn't really come across (sorry, I couldn't find the clip itself online). The Italian script goes:

AH: Alla prossima! Dio, questa è stata la migliore di tutte le volte! Sì, a parte l'occhio, certo...
Jane: Ma tu stavi recitando??
AH: Sì! Sono bravina, vero? Be', due anni di lezioni di recitazione private sono serviti...
(Alla ricerca di Jane)

[AH: Goodbye! God, this was the best time of all! Yes, apart from the eye, of course...
Jane: You were acting??
AH: Yes! I'm pretty good, right? Well, two years of private acting lessons worked...]

The difference is that in English, Jane is astonished that Amelia has turned out not to be British. Since Amelia doesn't do a bad job of channelling Miranda Richardson, and since any British accent at all sounds great beside the efforts of Lady Elizabeth Charming (Jennifer Coolidge), this works OK.

In Italian, Jane is just astonished that Amelia was putting on an act - which is much less plausible. I couldn't find any more suitable footage on Youtube than the gag reel, but to get an idea of Lady Amelia Heartwright's acting style, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4s2fGMA69Q#t=2m53s.

Having said that, metalingual comments must be among the most difficult things to translate, and I don't easily see how else the dubber could have done it. How was it done in other languages? All comments from people who've seen the Italian, or any, dubbed version are very welcome... 

Adrian Brunel redux: on subtitling and dubbing in the early 1930s

I mentioned Adrian Brunel's autobiography Nice Work in a recent post, as he observed the transition from the silent to the sound period from close up. On reading further we learn that he also worked as a subtitler some time in the early 1930s.

It is not very promising that the chapter where he describes his work in audiovisual translation is entitled 'Slumming':

I picked up a few little interesting jobs titling foreign films - interesting as jobs but deadly dull financially. After having been paid £250 for titling a silent foreign film, the maximum I could get for doing a foreign talkie was £40. As I [...] naturally gave part of my fee to Roy Lockwood, Reggie Beck or whoever was assisting me, it was hardly worth our time after we had learned what we could of the job. One think I learned still applies to-day [at time of writing in the late 1940s] - that the super-imposition of translated titles is a neglected art, probably because it is very badly paid. Most foreign film so titled are spoiled by not having had enough time, invention and skill expended on grappling with the problem of condensing eighteen spoken words into six printed words, of finding just the right place to superimpose the title, of judging when no title is necessary, of how to avoid unnecessary overlapping of a title on to two scenes and so on. (p.162)

It's interesting to see how little the basics of subtitling have changed in nearly a century, though subtitles were sparser and more selective, still, at the time Brunel was writing. Brunel himself felt that dubbing was superior to subtitling: 'superimposed translations [were] disturbing', while 'with care, patience, time and intelligence, almost perfect results can be obtained' in dubbing. He was involved in dubbing the Guido Brignone film La Wally, made in 1932, but found that the translation did not go far enough:

we did a fine job [...] but unfortunately my detailed and urgently stressed advice on how to edit the film for England was ignored, so that it was ruined by the inclusion of several passages which I knew would be regarded as ridiculous by English audiences. (p.165)

If you are interested in hearing more about these problems of audiovisual translation in the early years of sound, you may still (just about) be able to register for our conference 'Splendid Innovations', which takes place this Thursday 21 and Friday 22 May at the British Academy, London:

Only two more sleeps until the conference! \o/\o/

Translating cult TV and fiction into French

On the Arte site, this evening, this entertaining piece (in French) on the translation, dubbing and subtitling of cult media in France. Featuring, among others, Sylvestre Meininger and Anaïs Duchet of the Association des Traducteurs et Adaptateurs de l'Audiovisuel (ATAA):

For French speakers, the ATAA website is a fantastic source of information on the French audiovisual translation industry.

What does it mean to 'translate' a film?

My friend @YosemiteBailey posted a nice link on Twitter recently to a debate that has sprung up about US audiences and subtitling. The article, by David Poland on MovieCityNews, was responding to two recent articles. One, by Scott Foundas in Variety, claims that US audiences are increasingly comfortable with subtitled films (practically a topos of movie journalism, by now):

The second is a rebuttal by Anthony Kaufman on Indiewire, who points out that grosses for subtitled films in the US are falling significantly:

Poland makes the point that it's difficult to say whether or not US audiences like subtitled films or not when (a) the stats being discussed don't reflect new broadcast/distribution pathways such as VOD and (b) so many of the indie arms of major studios have backed away from subtitled films in general, so audiences aren't even being given the chance to vote with their feet.

But what interested me most about Poland's article was one of the comments. Poster Gonzalo Jimenez points out that

He's of course quite right that subtitles are widely watched in many countries, and also that Spain is one of the countries where dubbed films are more usual, for lots of historical and commercial reasons (for more on this see Martine Danan's 1991 article which can be downloaded as a pdf here).

What's really interesting here is the contrast that's set up between the subtitling of films and their 'translation', i.e. dubbing. What could it be about dubbing which makes it somehow seem more like 'translation' of the whole film than subtitling does? Is it a linguistic issue? It's not the first time I've seen 'translation' of a film equated with dubbing. Maybe it's something that's characteristic of Spanish usage.

But it also pops up in the research literature. In 1960, Edmond Cary referred to dubbing as 'traduction totale', or 'total translation'. For him, dubbing epitomises translation because it combines elements of text translation (but with the added constraint of not being able to shorten and omit), translation to be spoken and theatrical translation, the specific issue of lipsynch, the problem of the multimodality of film and the matching of the vocal to the gestural. He concludes that dubbing is the summit of the pyramid of types of translation, because 'tous les autres genres ne connaissent qu'une des facettes du langage: le doublage accepte d'être fidèle à toutes' [all the other types [of translation] are only concerned with one aspect of language: dubbing commits to being faithful to all of them].

Cary exaggerates the differences between dubbing and other forms of translation - it's certainly not only dubbing that has to be acutely sensitive to the nuance and the connotative meaning of words - but then he is expressing his ideas in the critical language of the day. Fidelity was the point of reference.  Print literature was the main context in which translation was considered. It's therefore not surprising that audiovisual translation feels like something that has to be clearly differentiated from 'conventional' translation. But it's still interesting that one form of audiovisual translation might feel 'more like translation' than another. It's particularly intriguing because dubbing in some languages, including Italian, gets referred to as a 'reduction', as in this example from an Italian release of Mr Blandings Builds his Dream House (aka La casa dei nostri sogni):

So there are a number of metaphors of audiovisual translation, and different languages may have different metaphors. Indeed, 'translation' itself above functions as a metaphor for audiovisual translation.

I think I feel another post coming on.

The many languages of Disney

I'm writing a piece at the moment on language policy and audiovisual translation, so I was interested to see this video doing the rounds on social media, featuring a twenty-five-language version of the song 'Let It Go' from the film Frozen:

It is a nice idea, even if it feels a little plastic (e.g. in the uncanny voice matching; or has this just been very carefully remixed for marketing purposes?). (And don't get me started on the costume/gender side of things - spontaneously slashing the dress halfway up the thigh as an empowering gesture? Really? Sigh.)

For the curious who lack the three and a half minutes necessary to watch the clip, the languages involved are: English, French from France, German, Dutch, Mandarin, Swedish, Japanese, Latin American Spanish (interestingly), Polish, Hungarian, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Korean, Serbian, Cantonese, Portuguese, Bahasa Malaysia, Russian, Danish, Bulgarian, Norwegian, Thai, Canadian French and Flemish.

I find myself wondering is this really all the languages into which the film has been dubbed, or just a useful round number which fitted into the running time of the song? Will this film be released only with subtitles in Greek, Czech, Slovenian, etc.? (I guess very possibly, because some of these are traditionally subtitling territories; readers please feel free to confirm or deny). Or will it skip some of these territories entirely? In what languages, if any, will this film play in India? In Africa? What form(s) of translation might it have into Arabic? Enquiring minds want to know.

UPDATE 1 June 2014: There's been a lot more discussion of this online since I posted this, which answers some of the questions above. Jayne Fox kindly posted a link in the comments to this article confirming that the film had been localised in 41 languages.

There's an excellent post by Elias Muhanna on the New Yorker blog this week about the treatment of the film in Arabic - it turns out that there is only one dub and it's into Modern Standard Arabic rather than the more usual Egyptian Arabic. Muhanna gives some nice back-translations into English of what the characters can actually be considered to be singing. The comments are worth reading too.

Muhanna also links to a Youtube fan video which offers snatches of the film in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Canadian French, Cantonese, Castilian Spanish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian, Malay, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

I make that 39 languages. Modern Standard Arabic is not included, and apparently there's a Filipino cover of 'Frozen' as well which may mean the film was localised there too. The question of India and the rest of Africa still seems to be an open one.

UPDATE 29 August 2016: The article on audiovisual subtitling research and policy that I was writing when I originally posted this is now out and can be found in the journal Target (paywalled, alas) at https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/target.28.2/toc. 

The letter or the spirit: V

I am an admirer of Alan Moore's fantastic graphic novel V for Vendetta. I hear poor things of the 2005 film, and I haven't wanted to see it, but I have come across the opening scene where Evey meets V, and the script calls for a positive volley of alliteration in 'v' (there is alliteration in the graphic novel but not at this point in the narrative):

The speech goes as follows:

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition! The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V.

I recently picked up an American DVD of the film, which has subtitles in Spanish and French, to see what the subtitlers did with this passage, and on the literal front, they seem to have done pretty well. The Spanish subtitles from the US disc (not necessarily the same as the subtitles on the DVD in Spain, I'd imagine?) can be seen here:

(sorry, I couldn't find a version without advertisements, and I couldn't find the French-subtitled clip online at all.)

So far, so straightforward. These are languages which share a lot of cognate words with English. But what would happen when the subtitles have to be done into Greek, or Russian, or any language with a different alphabet, or writing system? How would one account for the V, especially since presumably one can distinguish some kind of aural pattern even if one doesn't understand English?

Dubbed versions of the scene will need to grapple with a similar problem, though they won't be as vulnerable to odious comparisons with the English. Here you can see a French dubbed version (for our purposes please ignore the dubtitles):

and here you can see a version dubbed into French in Canada:

I make the count of initial 'V's in this speech 49 in English. Out of combined curiosity and insomnia, I took a look to see how the subtitled and dubbed versions measured up. The Spanish subtitles have 35 'V's; the French subtitles have 47. If we look at the two French dubbed versions, the 'Frenssh of Parys' has 52 and the Canadian dub has an impressive 60 (61, if we count 'vice-versa' as two). (Both the transcriptions can be found here). The Italian dub, which I won't even link to because four versions of this clip is plenty to sit through, lags behind at a mere 44.

Exceeding the alliterative tally of the source text is not the only criterion by which the quality of the translations can be judged, of course, but there's a pleasure in seeing a translator outdo the original, as Umberto Eco argued long ago about his translation of Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style.

Another criterion will of course be how natural and effortless the translations sound, or should sound. Any opinions out there on the relative quality of the French-French and the French-Canadian dub? Any other subtitles of this clip to compare with? [Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?]

free public lecture at Portsmouth on audiovisual translation

Hi all,

On Thursday 31 March, Adriana Tortoriello will give a seminar on subtitling in Park Building Room 2.15 at 5pm. The seminar will last about 2 hours and all are welcome.

Title: The geography of subtitling: Semiotic cohesion and geographically connotated language in subtitling.

Inglourious Basterds (yet again)

It appears that the subtitles were not the only thing amiss with the Italian release of Inglourious Basterds (see my post of a few days ago). The indefatigable Sam has just sent me this stinging criticism of the film's Italian dub from the Italian dubbing periodical aSinc. I would say there are not that many films that would defeat a really ingenious dubbing scriptwriter but it would appear that Inglourious Basterds, with its highly self-conscious use of multiple languages and translation tropes, is one of them. See here for a (frustratingly non-native) English translation of the article. The site has an impressive editorial board and looks extremely useful to anyone interested in dubbing.

Lecture on dubbing, London, Wednesday 10 February

For those of you who are in or around London and interested in audiovisual translation, there's a very eminent speaker giving a lecture at Imperial on Wednesday:

Date: Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Time: 5-6 pm
Room: Huxley Building, Room 144

Dr. Frederic Chaume - Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain

'An Introduction to Dubbing in Europe: Professional Conventions'

Whereas new technologies seem to favour globalisation in many areas of translation, dubbing shows a reluctance to embrace this trend of globalisation. Translation memories are now used to make translation easier and faster all over the world. In the area of audiovisual translation, new subtitling software has been developed, which is now widely used among both practitioners and companies. Also in subtitling, most microtextual practices (line segmentation, subtitle segmentation, typographical usages, synthesis of information, etc.) are followed by the majority of professionals. But dubbing seems to refuse to bend to homogenisation. Perhaps due to notions of nationalism and singularity attached to this concept, dubbing still shows different macro- and microtextual practices in the European countries in which it is the most popular type of audiovisual translation.

This talk introduces audiovisual translation and dubbing and also examines four different dubbing practices at a microtextual level -those carried out in Germany, Italy, Spain and France. Before considering new failed attempts to globalise this practice, and also some major advances brought by new technologies, the paper focuses on the differences in layout, take segmentation and dialogue writing in these four countries. These differences show that dubbing practices are still very conservative, and resistant to change and homogenisation (Linguistica Antverpiensia, 6/2007, pp. 203-207)

Dr. Frederic Chaume is a Professor of Audiovisual Translation at the Universitat Jaume I (Castelló, Spain), where he teaches audiovisual translation theory, dubbing and subtitling. He has twenty years' experience in the audiovisual translation industry. He is author of the books Doblatge i subtitulació per a la TV (Barcelona: Eumo, 2003), Cine y Traducción (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004), Teories Actuals de la Traducció (forthcoming, Bromera) and Audiovisual Translation: Dubbing (St. Jerome, in preparation).

For a complete list of 2009-2010 seminars at Imperial (some really good speakers) see: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/humanities/translationgroup/guestspeakers