Part of the paper will talk about meaning-making in typography and specifically in film intertitles and subtitles. (I've said something about this before here)
Now I have come across this splendid fansubtitled video about Thranduil and the gems of Lasgalen, from Peter Jackson's Hobbit adaptation. Every character gets a different subtitle typeface:
So, two questions:
1) Which typeface is best suited to its character? Answers in the comments please.
2) Which can you actually read without eyestrain? The video is shooting for accessibility, which is always a good thing, but the typefaces are not, really.
And if readers out there want to rank the typefaces in order of most to least accessible, I'm all ears!
I was just watching Michael Verhoeven's 1990 film Das schreckliche Mädchen [The Nasty Girl] and I was struck by this exchange between the protagonist Sonja and her crush Martin, a trainee teacher.
MARTIN: Wenn ich mein Staatsexamen hab' komm'ich zurück zu dir...vielmehr - zu Ihnen. [Pause.] Wollen wir nicht Du sagen zueinander?
SONJA: Doch, schon.
MARTIN: Ich heiß' Martin.
SONJA: Weiß schon...
Translating the shift from formal to informal address, which is standard in many languages but somehow not in English, is always tricky. (And not just in subtitling either. For a great discussion about this, sparked by an ingenious solution of Ros Schwartz's, see this languagehat post.)
A rough translation of Martin's remark would be something like: When I pass my state teaching exam, I'll come back to you [informal]...or rather [correcting himself] - to you [formal]. [Pause.] Can't we address each other as you [informal]?.
Multimodal elements of this scene will have to be taken into account. Kinetics, mise en scène, sound and rhythm may reinforce, undercut or otherwise inflect what's happening with the dialogue. A distinct change of mood occurs when Martin sees Sonja's secret framed photograph of him. He takes off his glasses. The scene opens with him standing while she sits. When he catches sight of the picture he crouches down to see better. She stands up so that she is momentarily taller than him; he stands and is again taller than her. His face is surprised, then serious; hers is quizzical. There's a short pause before he corrects Du to Sie and then a longer pause before he suggests that they call each other Du. All these things contribute to how the scene signifies, and may act as a guide (consciously or intuitively) to the subtitler.
Obviously, English uses the same word for both Du and Sie, so if transposed directly Martin's self-correction would make no sense, and there is no corresponding English expression for the question abut using Du.
The subtitler of this clip on the Miramax Youtube channel solves the problem as follows:
The subtitler changes the emphasis of Martin's line. Instead of correcting himself, he starts by saying that he will come back (implied, to the school), and then corrects himself that he will come back to her, specifically. You can see the whole clip here (it's at 2 mins 24 secs):
My 1992 VCI videocassette edition has, presumably, a different (unnamed) subtitler, and a different solution. The subtitler in fact has done the opposite of what the Miramax subtitler did:
This solution actually fits more closely with the dynamic of this scene, since he moves from a more intimate register (back to you) to a more 'formal' register in that 'to all of you' re-situates her as just a girl in his class. The long pause gives him time to gather his courage to request that they start using Du (and, by implication, that they begin a romantic relationship). The rather awkwardly formal 'Shall we be on Christian-name terms' is not out of keeping with the film's register.
So, a nice example of how opposite approaches by two translators can both work, in the moment.
More on translating formal and informal address, in a future post. Meanwhile if anybody has a copy of this film to hand, in any language, with a different subtitling solution, I'd love to hear about it.
UPDATE 20 August 2016: I rewrote and extended this post because on re-viewing the clips I realised I'd missed a couple of important things. (That will teach me to blog late at night.)
UPDATE 24 August 2016: The wonderful 20th-Century Flicks in Bristol turns out to have yet another subtitled version of the film, distributed by Arrow on Region 2 DVD (dated 2005). It has quite a different take on this scene again. The subtitles are by Lotti Mardell and Peter Templeton for SBS Australia, dated 2002:
This solution works very well to get across the levels of formality, though there's a lack of correspondence between the audio, where the proper names are not heard, and the subtitles. The trade-off seems worth it in this instance.
Any more versions out there...? Any information that might help me identify the subtitlers of the first two versions?
I made a long-awaited trip back to Southsea this weekend and popped in to my favourite bookshop in the world, Adelphi Books on Albert Road, where I acquired (among other trifles) some 1930s issues of Sight and Sound. The autumn 1935 issue contains a review by Arthur Vesselo of Petersburg Nights (Roshal & Stroyeva, 1934) (referred to in the review as St. Petersburg, known in France as Les nuits de Saint-Pétersbourg). (I note that the film was nominated in the same year for the Mussolini Cup for Best Foreign Film at the Venice Film Festival, but otherwise seems to have had an undistinguished career.)
(image borrowed from Encyclocine)
Vesselo isn't happy with the film, or the translation:
The film as a whole has little real solidity: its movements are feeble, its climaxes crude. The propagandist element lacks both purpose and subtlety, and the nineteenth-century setting is infinitely less convincing than the customary Russian treatment of present-day conditions. What virtue remains is ruthlessly massacred by the sub-titles.
This question of sub-titles needs long and deep consideration. They meet us at every turn: sub-titles misplaced, sub-titles mis-spelt, sub-titles inept, sub-titles abominable. They throw out the composition of shots, ruin their photographic quality, and break up their continuity - sometimes they seem to swamp the picture completely. (Sight and Sound 1935, vol. 4, no.15, p.124)
There were very competent subtitlers working in London in this period - Mai Harris, Julia Wolf - so one suspects that these abominable sub-titles may have been produced in the country of origin - well, we'll see, if a copy can be tracked down in the archive.
It's worth noting by the by that Vesselo doesn't seem a big fan of dubbing either: in the same section he reviews a Czech film, Volga in Flames, and complains that the dubbed English dialogue
was hardly a success. the lack of correspondence between words and mouth-movements can be ignored, but the vast unsuitability of Western tone and accent is another matter. Cossacks and Cockneys have little in common; and at moments of tension the formal intonation of the studio reduces the action to bathos. Choice of language also provides its problems. Wherever, in fact, the dialogue ceased for a space to be predominant, and the film was left to rely upon its original sounds, the story was lifted bodily to a higher sphere.
Interestingly, Vesselo doesn't note that the film was in fact dubbed from French (thanks to Sam B. for pointing this out) as the film was a French-Czech co-production with Danielle Darrieux and Albert Préjean, also known as Volga en flammes:
A snippetlet for those of my readers who enjoy film translations of yore. This clip is from an Italian release of the 1947 musical extravaganza Variety Girl,
directed by George Marshall and starring just about everybody who was anybody:
In this
sequence Pearl Bailey, in her first film role, part-speaks, part-sings
the song 'Tired':
Italy is so well known as a dubbing territory - indeed, almost *the* dubbing territory par excellence - that nobody
talks much about the role of subtitling, particularly in the first decades of sound. I did
not know that Italian distributors of the 1940s ever subtitled songs, but shall be keeping an eye out from now on.
And look at the font! The size of it! The lovely clean lines
of it! As the kind poster of the clip, EmeliusBisestile, observes wistfully, and as I have
mentioned before, fonts from the 30s and 40s offer a kind of viewing pleasure which is lacking in resubtitled versions with more functional, modern fonts, for all their legibility and fancy dropshadows, etc.
And yet - I feel that such fonts are wonderfully charming, but I am uncomfortably aware that I cannot say what and wherefore. Are there any font nerds sorry, typeface experts out there who could do a font
identification on these subtitles for me? I can just about identify it as sans-serif, but I would love to know more - what it's called, where else it was used, how it evokes that sense of period...? If print texts are multimodal in their use of typeface, and therefore typeface itself is an element of the translation of printed texts (see here for some more thoughts on this) then what's the role of the subtitle typeface, superimposed on the image, as an element of translation? What kind of meaning-making potential does it have (apart from inspiring hopeless nostalgia in geeks like me)? Comments welcome.
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?]
