I Think They Should Stick With Subtitles

We literary translation people rarely talk about one of the more interesting translation topics--that would be translations for film. It's a hugely complex, but very little discussed, matter.

But Words Without Borders, which has just published its "movie" issue, has a great article on translation vis a vis dubbing.

I don't really like dubbed films. No matter how well it's done, dubbing just feels sort of cheesy to me. I just can't disassociate even the best dubbing from my memories of really, really bad Hong Ku action flicks, where voices emanate from closed mouths and the lips only match the articulated sounds by happenstance.

And it turns out that dubbing is actually quite hard, if this article in Words Without borders is any indication at all:

Essentially the lip movements of the actor on the screen must match the sounds you hear, those that are produced by the actor in the recording studio. To simplify, let’s say we’re mostly concerned here with bilabial consonants, i.e., the consonants that are pronounced with both lips touching. In English, as in French, there are only three, [b] as in “bat,” [m] as in “mat,” and [p] as in “pat.” To complicate things a little further, there are also semi-labials you have to watch for, i.e., consonants pronounced with the lips coming very close but not quite touching, [v] as in “vat,” [f] as in “fat,” [w] as in “what,” and the retroflex [r] as in “rat.” Luckily, you don’t need to match these sounds perfectly. For example, the French translator/adaptor can use a word with an [m] sound to fit over any of the English bilabials or semi-labials. On the screen, the audience will only notice that the lips touch or seem to touch when a French sound is pronounced where the lips should either touch or come close to touching. We’re dealing with film, and film is illusion.

So when the screen actor in the Canadian TV series Cold Squad said, “or even four people, well . . . ” I had the studio actor say “ou quatre hommes dans ma vie.” The audience saw the lips closing on the first and second syllable of “people” and then come close to touching on “well,” they heard “hommes dans ma vie” instead, not realizing that the sound [m] of “hommes” replaced the first [p] of “people,” that the second [p] of “people” was replaced by the [m] of “ma,” and that [w] in “well” had become the sound [v] of “vie” in French. And it worked.

I’m simplifying the process here, because I don’t want to subject you to the forty-five-hour lecture on film translation I give at the university.

From what I understand, translating for subtitles is hard enough, but this just sounds murderous. I think we should do everyone a favor and just end dubbing altogether.