Rough Translations

Foreign films have the challenge of being understood in more than one language. Subtitles are problematic gateways to these films because 1) translation is just plain tricky, and 2) they are, of course, written—they’re not quite speech from another language. I won’t dwell too much on the first point, but suffice it to say that translation isn’t just matching up words from one language to another. Languages say things differently—sometimes much differently—than others.

The ears are working overtime to attempt to understand what’s being said—or how it’s being said—whether we want them to or not. You can hear the actors’ inflections and tone, but you can’t count on really understanding the shades of meaning they convey because culturally and linguistically they don’t always match up with what we expect. Luckily, context helps and we can watch the actor’s behavior, too. Maybe that’s part of why we sometimes gesture when we speak. Gestures may have been our first language and now they’ve become a supplement. Or maybe gestures are a side effect of speaking?…

The eyes are working overtime to take in the whole scene, going back and forth between the action and the subtitles. Luckily, the average adult can read around 250 words per minute and the recommended talking speed for comprehension is about 150 words per minute, so there’s usually enough time to keep up with the subtitles. (A different, but fascinating phenomena is that human languages all cluster around nearly the same rate of spoken information per minute: other languages just sound a lot faster.)

During the film festival that just wrapped up we watched a comedy about a couple who did voiceovers of films when they lived in Russia, before they emigrated to Israel. The film is in both Hebrew and Russian, but the subtitles gave no indication which language was being used, so it was sometimes hard to tell when something was funny because the couple wasn’t fluent in Hebrew or if it was just funny. There was an Australian film that I wish we had subtitles for because it was often hard to understand the dialog. In fact, we’ll often turn subtitles on for British and Australian films and TV shows—just so we don’t miss any words or phrases that we aren’t familiar with. (And, to be honest, sometimes we even turn subtitles on for American films…)

Tangentially, it’s interesting to note that Shakespeare’s plays are deceptively challenging for modern English speakers because they are in a distinctly different dialect, if not quite a different language. The biggest problem being that the meanings of many words have drifted since then: the way that real people use certain words in everyday life have changed so much that we fool ourselves a little into believing we understand Shakespeare’s characters, even when we don’t quite. Word-for-word subtitles would not solve this problem nearly as well as a modern translation.

But even reading the text of my native language being spoken isn’t the same as listening to it being spoken. And reading the subtitles while listening to the actor’s rhythm and intonation and trying to re-assemble them in real time is work—and not always satisfying. It just doesn’t land the same way that spoken language does.

But all of the complexities and difficulties aside, subtitles are still enormously powerful. They give us a way to understand stories and ideas we might not otherwise have access to. They can entice us to pay a little more attention, tricking us into more carefully considering things we think we recognize. They emphasize a perennial question of life as well as film: what is going on in this scene?

Text/Texture

I love books. I am excited by new discoveries, ideas, knowledge. I like learning.

I love the feel of books, too: their weight, the flexing and yielding of paperbacks and the stately solidity of a hardcover. The heft of a stack of books feels like treasure. I was cleaning up broken glass very early one morning and was struck with wonder at how it is that we can feel with our fingertips a single shard of glass—really just a grain of sand—so small that we can scarcely see it. And our sensitive fingertips and alert brains, as Kurt Vonnegut remarked, tell us that books are good for us. I love the feel of the pages of a book: not the glossy, plasticky kind, but the slightly rough, porous kind. The kind that inspires awe when you look closely and consider the typographical outposts imposed on that fibrous terrain.

And you can see on the page and in your mind the weaving of a good story, description or explanation. And in seeing it so clearly, you can almost feel the warp and woof of good writing like the texture of a warm blanket.