PART II DUBBING OR NOT DUBBING

Transcription

1 PART II DUBBING OR NOT DUBBING 1

2 Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms. Alfred Hitchcock 2

3 INTRODUCTION This work is an introduction to the audiovisual translation, a young sector in the field of translation studies, that has gained importance since the 90s, thanks to the large circulation of audiovisual materials. Audiovisual texts are complex texts, made up of different languages, different communication systems and verbal and non verbal codes (verbal, acoustic and visual). Within the field of audiovisual translation we will deal with screen translation, that is the translation of texts, based on the script of movies and TV series. Even if international studies have focused on translations for television for some years, cinema is still the main protagonist in the field of translation. We will analyze some translations of script for dubbing, in order to understand if they are oriented towards the source culture or towards the target one. Even if translated texts have to be considered independently from the culture that has produced them, because they are elements of the target culture, and they live in a new socio cultural context, we still have to keep in mind which are the different implications of this statement depending on whether we are referring to a written text (where only the verbal code is involved) or, by contrast, if we are referring to an audiovisual text (where different codes are involved). In the first case a written text can be translated in order to create a new one, which is completely target oriented; on the contrary, in the second case, the text, for example a script for a movie, is made up of different codes (visual, sound, verbal etc ), so, while the verbal aspect is oriented towards the target culture, images, sounds still belong to the source culture. Therefore the hiatus in the audiovisual translation between domestication and foreignisation (concepts that will be clarified in the pages below) is irreconcilable. It is interesting to understand is how foreign films and TV programs, are transformed in elements of our culture once they arrive in Italy. In the next pages we will analyze in particular the translation for dubbing; firstly because, it has been the form of translation privileged in Italy, since talking cinema was born. Secondly because it is the most target oriented type of translation. In the next pages, after an introduction of the technical aspects of AVT, we will discuss about different 3

4 examples of dubbing, in order to outline the main points of this process and give evidence of the uniqueness and complexity of a dialogue writer s work. 4

5 1.2 History of dubbing Since its very beginning, the movie industry has tried to make talking films, the first years of Cinema were characterized by the production of silent movies and the subsequently introduction of dialogues and talking movies radically changed the business. Everything began in 1926, whit the invention of the Vitaphone system: a sound-on-disc process in which the soundtrack was not printed on the actual film, but was issued separately on discs which would be played while the film was being projected. 1 Later the first talking film was released, the Jazz Singer (by Alan Crosland, 1927), which includes the famous first dialogue in the history of Cinema: Wait a minute, you ain t heart nothin yet and it was followed in 1928 by the first all talking feature film : Light of New York. 2 Before the introduction of talking movies, the American production was largely present in Europe, and in Italy it accounted for the absolute majority of the programming. Thus, with the introduction of talking films an immediate problem arose, that is how could the new English speaking cinema spread to other countries? In Italy this problem was solved by equipping the theatres with a Vitaphone Movietone system, provided by the Western Electric, which allowed the projection both of movies with a soundtrack (sound on film), and of those accompanied by discs (sound on disc). On April 14 th 1929 the feature film The Jazz Singer was presented with its original discs at the Supercinema of Rome and some captions with explanations in Italian were placed in the scenes with dialogues, in order to make the Italian audience understand the movie. The film was very successful: nobody noticed that with the introduction of these signs a part of the image on the screen was omitted in order not to lose the synchronism. Actually the problem could be solved right from the beginning: in the USA in 1928 already the mixer, an amplifier with different entrances, was used to add to the movies the sounds that were recorded separately. 1 Wikipedia:< 2 This information is based on the Italian book: M. Paolinelli, E. DiFortunato, Tradurre per il doppiaggio, Milan, Hoepli, 2005, pp. 3 8 [my translation in English]. 5

6 Even if this technology was defined dubbing, it was not designed to be used in film translation and in fact other different solutions were adopted by the global market. For instance, the Paramount industry had, at the beginning of the sound age, some plants in Paris, at Joinville, where it started realizing multiple versions of the movies, each of which was directed and performed in the different target languages, with a huge and unjustified expenditure of energy, which showed how much the Americans needed the European market. Different Italian films were shot in this way by Jack Salvatori, such as: Il segreto del dottore, a version of Doctor s Secret, by William DeMille, Il richiamo del cuore from Sarah and Son, by Dorothy Arzner, La donna Bianca from The Letter, byjean de Limur, La vacanza del diavolo from The Devil s Holiday, by Edmound Goulding. 3 This practice was abandoned in 1929, when, as Charles Ford wrote, Jakob Karol who had overall responsibility for Paramount s German films, invented the method of film dubbing. 4 In Italy the Fox industry entrusted Louis Loeffler an American director who knew the Italian language and who was married with an Italian woman the task of experimenting dubbing system. The first film, completely dubbed into Italian, was Tu che mi accusi (by Victor Fleming, 1930). Still in Italy, where people had not accepted the solution of multiple versions, on 22 nd October 1930, the Ministry of the Interior decided to deny the censorship visa to those films who had some parts spoken in foreign languages, even if to a very small degree, as he did not approve the solution of the added captions in foreign films. The Minister of the Interior, Benito Mussolini, thought that national movie production should not be a means of circulation for foreign languages and for the cultures behind them. And after this censorial measure, the national film production did not exceed a dozen movies, and this number was not sufficient to meet the needs of national movie theatres, most of which were obliged to close. The expedient was to silence the foreign sound films, by interrupting the scenes with captions, which explained the dialogues of actors in the original movie. 3 Film titles taken from the book of M. Paolinelli, E. Di Fortunato, quoted, pp C.Ford, Paramount at Joinville, in Films in Review, n. 9, November 1961, this concept is reported in the book quoted above. 6

7 In this period the films, dubbed with the German technology, started circulating in different countries and the critic Andrea Uccellini provided important evidence of how one of the first dubbing process was carried out. In fact he wrote in the review L eco del cinema about the film Prix the beauté by Augusto Genina: Girate le scene della versione muta, ora Genina dirige i suoi interpreti negli studi di Tobis di Epinay per la versione parlante e Sonora in Quattro lingue, col proposito di fare la più grande diffusion. E la prima volta da che esiste il film parlante che si verifica un tal fatto, che però presenta difficoltà non comuni, ma che saranno superate. Si attende la première con impazienza. 5 The first synchronization studio was built in the Palatino plant, in Rome, where, one year later, foreign films started being dubbed, mainly the German ones. The first dubbed films in Italy were: in 1931 Salto Mortale and Il congresso si diverte and in 1932 L ultima compagnia, Sua Altezza comanda, Tragedia nella miniera, A me la libertà, Atlantide, Ragazze in uniforme. 6 In this way the practice of dubbing was started in Italy and the Columbia industry opened its studios in Italy, followed by the Metro Goldwin Mayer industry. Since talking cinema was introduced in Italy, Italians showed a great interest in film dubbing and in the postwar years dubbed films became a model for the linguistic habits. Therefore the analysis of the dubbing practice, widespread in Italy, is essential to understand the evolution of the national language. In fact, cinema has given a decisive contribute to the diffusion of a united popular Italian language as it has been said by Tullio De Mauro spreading Italian in many areas, where dialect was spoken. 5 A. Uccellini, Lettera da Parigi, in L eco del cinema, n. 73, December 1929, this concept is reported in the book of M. Paolinelli, E. Di Fortunato, quoted, p. 7. [My translation in English: Once have shot scenes in the silent version, now Genina directs his actors in the Tobis di Epinay s studios for the talking versions in four different languages, with the aim of making the film as much famous as possible. This is the first time, since the birth of talking films, that such a fact occurs, it is not simple to be solved, but it will. We are waiting for the première impatiently]. 6 Film titles taken from the book quoted above, p. 8. 7

8 2. THE AUDIO VISUAL TRANSLATION 2.1. Definition of audio visual translation The definition of audio visual translation (AVT) has rapidly spread over the last years and it is becoming the standard definition for this kind of translation. There is also another definition, multimedia translation, which includes a wide range of products that goes from audiovisual materials, to web to CDS ROM. Another term frequently used in the Anglo Saxon world is that of screen translation and it includes all those products that are distributed on different screens of cinema, television and computers. 7 The media play an important role in this age of globalization and global communications, writes the essayist Zoe Pettit (Senior Lecturer in French and Director of Learning & Quality for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Greenwich). The essayist adds, The introduction and subsequent boom in satellite television, plus the Internet, has made the world a much smaller place, allowing different peoples, cultures and languages to interact more frequently. The screen is a primary vehicle for this interaction and as a result the audio visual translator has an increasingly important role to play. The audio visual text is a complex medium. The translator deals with verbal and non verbal codes [ ]. 8 AVT includes different fields of activity, the most important of which are dubbing and subtitling, though we will take into account only the first form of screen translation, for it is the most used in Italy. Dubbing is the post-production process of recording and replacing voices on a motion picture or television soundtrack subsequent to the original shooting. The term most commonly refers to the substitution of the voices of the actors shown on the screen by those of different performers, who may be speaking a different language. 9 The dubbing process 7 This definition is based on the translation of the definition given in the Italian book: I. Ranzato, La traduzione audiovisiva, Bulzoni Editore, Rome, 2010, p < see the bibliography. 9 < 8

9 regards several audio visual genres, such as: films, television series, news programs and documentaries. According to Bollettieri Bosinelli (language and translation professor at the Universities of Bologna and Forlì), translation for dubbing implies a total translation, because it has to take into account not only values related to the meaning of the source utterance, but also the phonological values, such as intonation, length of words and labial synchronization. 10 Among the constraints to the audiovisual translation there are those coming from movie and TV industries, because this field of translation has to follow the rules of the market. One of the greatest challenges for a movie after its domestic release is to reach an international audience and being successful abroad depends on its dubbed versions. AVT presents also technical constraints, which, in the case of dubbing, are due to synchronization. Synchronization, according the definition provided by John Benjamins, is one of the features of translation for dubbing, which consists of matching the target language translation and the articulatory and body movements of the screen actors and actresses, as well as matching the utterances and pauses in the translation and those of the source text. This definition suggests three types of synchronization: Phonetic or lip synchrony (synchronization between the translation and the screen actors articulatory movements). Kinetic synchrony (synchronization between the translation and the screen actors body movements). Isochrony or synchrony between utterances and pauses (synchronization between the translated and the source text utterances) Bollettieri Bosinelli, (2002:76, see the bibliography) [my translation in English of the Italian concept]. 11 John Benjamins, Topics in audiovisual translation, Pilar Orero,

10 4. THE WORLD BEHIND FILMS 4.1. What is a film? The image impress more than words: Cinema marks the time of humankind, but also the time of its cultures. The power of movie writing is one of the reasons why the seventh art has gained an important role and an excellent incisiveness, which are two elements that have made its glory and its fortune. In recent years filmmakers have become famous, and a significant icon of this success can is represented by the Italian film director Giuseppe Tornatore. Tornatore is an important icon of the film production of the last century, because his cinema is characterized by feelings based on the values of mass culture, with references to cultures and societies that are often anchored to traditions reluctant to change and integration. In his films Tornatore describes the world through images, something more difficult than using the letter of the alphabet. The complexity and the vividness of images make the narration more lively, rich, incisive, helping the viewer perceive the message of the film; the subjective perception is enriched with sensations, which the written texts can hardly show. So his films, such as Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, Baarìa, La leggenda del pianista sull oceano, La sconosciuta, succeed in showing, through the sequence of images, characters and stories, things that novels could hardly describe with the same incisiveness, and in leaving a permanent mark in the conscience of viewers. Cinema, more than other arts, has the capacity and the responsibility of resuming in its expressive form a plurality of other artistic forms, such as: images, music, narration, color, sound in a mix of reality and fantasy. But what is exactly a film? According to Giuseppe Tornatore 12 it is a succession of images and sounds disconnected between each other, without a relation, a reason and only the centuries 12 Next definitions are based on the translation of a part of a Lectio doctoralis pronounced by Giuseppe Tornatore on the occasion of the conferment of the honorary degree in Television, Cinema and New media at the IULM University of Milan, 1 st December 2009, in G. Tornatore, La menzogna del cinema, Milan, Bompiani,

11 old imperfection of the viewer s eyeball and his intuitive contribution can transform this sequence of images and sounds into a narration that makes sense. Anyway, even if the film seems to be a confused succession of expressive elements, which only the human perception can turn into a significant order, it has its own autonomy, an own independence and self determination. A film originates from an idea, a frame of mind, a character, a sentence, a book, an historical episode, a dream etc And the incubation of the original idea is the first step in the process of film creation. It s possible to define this process not as writing, but only rewriting. The first attempt to set down the idea on paper is already an example of rewriting. Another case of rewriting occurs when the original subject is turned into a script. The choice of the locations, of the cast members and the shooting are other examples of rewriting. The most drastic rewriting is represented by the editing, because a film can even be changed during this phase. And even after the editing, the rewriting process does not end, it continues during the post production phase. Dubbing is a part of this phase, so it represents another case of rewriting. Dubbing a film means rewriting it. 11

12 4.2. Dubbing is rewriting The close relationships between culture, language and translation are confirmed by the evolution of translation studies, which have opened to a broader interpretation of the relation between texts and the contexts they belong to. The traditional concept of adherence of the translated text to the original one has lost its priority during the years and, currently, the attention of researchers is focused on the concept of translation as a rewriting and a creation of a new text in a new context. During recent years the translation researchers have focused not only on the language, but also on the interaction between translation and culture, on the way the cultural context affects the translation and, thanks to Lefevere (1992) in particular, on the concept of translation as a rewrite, first of all film rewriting. Besides, Lefevere has the merit of having broadened the perspective of translation by studying the wider socio cultural context. Analyzing movie translation, we can affirm that the dubbing process in itself consists in rewriting the source text into another language, in which the message of the source script has to be transposed. Dubbing reflects the double principle. 13 This is a translation of a sentence included in an Italian essay of the researcher Franco La Polla. He continues explaining that, in dubbing, films can be interpreted more easily, because they show images, which complete the meaning of words; and all this facilitates the task of dubbers, who have the possibility to achieve a closer adherence to the original meanings of words. However, when a dialogue writer starts translating a foreign script into his\ her own language, any variations is potentially acceptable, but these variations can cause the loss of cultural values expressed by the source film s characters, neutralizing in this way the filmmakers ideas, present in the source version. Dialogue writers and dubbers are mediators and thanks to them different cultural systems are put into contact, their hard task being that of reproducing a film s message into another language, without twisting its meaning. In fact if they 13 F. La Polla, Quel che si fa dopo mangiato: doppiaggio e contesto culturale, in R. Baccolini, R. M. Bollettieri Bosinelli, L. Gavioli (eds), 1994, Il doppiaggio trasposizioni linguistiche e culturali, Bologna, Clueb, 1994, pp The main points of this Italian essay are clarified above [my translation in English]. 12

13 twist the meaning of a film, they will firstly deceive the filmmakers will, and secondly they will betray the target audience, which has the right to get the original essence of the film and not what the authors of the dubbed version want it to be. Dubbing is an opportunity, as long as it does not lie. 13

14 4.5. Woody Allen, 40 years of Cinema People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn't and you lose. 14 (Figure 6, Woody Allen) Woody Allen 15 (figure 6) was born on December 1 st, 1935, New York. He is an American director, a scriptwriter, an actor, a writer and a playwright. His directorial debut behind the camera goes back to 1969, with his first film Take the Money and Run, scripted in collaboration with his friend Mickey Rose. During his first experience as a director, Woody Allen found himself in the middle of an ever changing period: a revolutionary decade was drawing to an end and another one was about to start, with new expectations. Allen found himself in the middle of strong currents of thought, but he was aware of the reasons that had led him to success, and mindful of his film idols, from Groucho Marx to Bob Hope, he chose to adapt his verbal nonsense to images. The result is a product that surprised almost everybody. The audience was surprised by a comedy, which was completely detached from reality; his first films were characterized by a simple and physical comedy, a traditional slapstick comedy, which is a kind of comedy uniquely based on images and action and in which dialogues have not any relevance for the comic effect; it is conveyed by a frenetic rhythm of sight gags and scathing lines, which have always 14 Woody Allen s quotation. 15 The biographical information below is based on this Italian book: P. M. Bocchi, Woody Allen, quarant anni di cinema, Genoa, Le Mani

15 characterized the dialogues of Allen s films and which are held together through a weak plot. During its first years as a director, Woody Allen spoke, whenever possible, about politics (Bananas, USA 1971), stung the bon ton and the bourgeois taste (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask, USA 1972), about the future of societies (Sleeper, USA 1973), dealt with high themes with irony (Love and Death, USA 1975): in five years he implemented a first type of Slapstick Allenism, based on comedy. The turning point occurred in 1977, with what is considered his masterpiece, that is to say the movie Annie Hall, which marked the changeover to a more sophisticated comedy, by exemplifying the new model for the genre of the Romantic Comedy. During the 80s, he started including in his films some philosophical references and showing his nonconformity. His movies were not only comic, but also reflective, the plot started playing the main role, thus becoming more complex. During this period one of the distinguishing characteristics of Allen s cinematography appeared, that is to say a reflection on the director s role, and more in general a reflection on the cinematic art, which gave life to a series of meta film movies. The first film of this genre was Stardust Memories (USA,1980), which drew inspiration from the European Cinema and from the director Federico Fellini. By contrast the film production of the 90s came back to lighter themes, even if it maintained a refined style, movies of this period are: Mighty Aphrodite, USA 1995, Everyone Says I Love You, USA, These three periods, that we have analyzed, outline the different phases of the Allenism, that is to say the poetics of Allen s film production, based on the life experiences of the director himself and on his penetrating and ironic analysis of reality. The various messages conveyed by his Allenism are heavy, significant, they regard life, society, fate. His recent films are characterized by both comic and dramatic aspects, but they cannot be compared to his first films. At present, Woody Allen and his movies should be analyzed with different parameters, that are referred to the society and not to the previous theory. 15

16 Otherwise people will run the risk of worshipping the director, on the basis of the first years of his movie production, of the first forms of Allenism, without considering that the poetics of Woody Allen has changed over the years. Currently, the poetics is different from the past, not better or worse, but different and it has to be interpreted in a new way, according different parameters. In fact at the end of the 90s and at the beginning of the new century Woody Allen understood that the world was changing and he decided to change with it, in order to better understand and analyze the reality around him. But he is still able to understand the mechanism of society, in the same way he did thirty or forty years ago; he can analyze human beings, men in society, the individual, the couple, today as yesterday. All his films convey significant messages, depict reality, sometimes in a paradoxical way, people are reflected in his movies, their characters are true, Allen has used also himself and his personality to shoot films. The themes, he deal with, regard everyone, in the film Match Point (2005), where the image of the tennis ball, which is in the balance on the net, reflects the life of anybody. It can remain in your court, it can go in the other, it just depends on fate, and fate regards anybody s life. So each film he has shot, has an internal consistency, made up of the language, images and sound he used and an external consistency, that is the macro context 16 on which his films are built. The macro context is constituted by Allen s themes, Allen s own way to do films, and it represents a series of interpretative keys, that the dialogue writers should know, in order to deal with the script and start dubbing in the right ways. In the next pages we will describe two examples taken from the Allen s movie Sleeper, 1973, belonging to Allen s first period of movie production. Italian dubbed version is full of interesting translation solutions. 16 The concept of macro context is reported in the essay of Gianni G. Galassi, Tre funerali e un matrimonio, in R.M Bollettieri Bosinelli, C. Heiss, M. Soffritti, S. Bernardini (eds), La traduzione multimediale: quale traduzione per quale testo? Bologna, Clueb, 2000, pp

17 The dubbing of Sleeper This movie is set in the future and it speaks about a man, Miles Monroe, who, hibernated in 1973, at the age of 35, is woken up by some scientists in The world, in which he awakens, is unrecognizable. The nations have disappeared because of an atomic war; the Earth is divided into two areas, the east and the west, the first of which is governed by a dictator, the Leader, who is the enemy of intellectuals, subversives, outsiders. However in this area people are organizing a resistance movement against the Leader, led by the young Erno. Miles escapes from the followers of the dictator and he becomes a butler at the home of a poet, Luna, whom he converts to the cause of revolutionaries. Meanwhile the dictator is killed in an attack, and the only part of his body to be found, his nose, has been carried to a laboratory in order to regenerate the Leader; so Erno entrusts Miles and Luna the important task of hampering the regeneration of the dictator. They succeed in entering the laboratory and messing up the plan of the dictator s followers. Sleeper is a movie of the first period of Allen s directorial career, so it has a linear plot, on which the different comic expedients are built and the real difficulty of the filmmaker consists in mixing the narrative and the comic parts. In it we found quotations from other films and cultural references, so we will analyze two scenes 17 of this movie, in order to analyze the translation solutions, chosen for dubbing. In the first scene Miles, hibernated and waken up in the future, is talking to the doctor about some personalities of his time, (chart 6). In this example there are some cultural references that the audience of the target version may or might not know. They are cultural elements, which can be probably understood by a limited number of viewers of the target version, so the dialogue writer has the job of choosing which ones have to be maintained or eliminated to foster an easier comprehension of the translated dialogues. 17 These examples are taken from the book of I. Ranzato, quoted, pp and pp

18 CONCLUSION So in this section we have analyzed the translation for dubbing and all the implications behind it. Starting with the Italian adaptation of the American sitcom The Simpsons, we have seen how the use of dialects can be useful to convey in the target version the same message of the source one, thus respecting the intention of the authors. Then with the analysis of two scenes from the film Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973) we have seen how it is difficult to transfer cultural references from the source film to the target one. Each film, of course, brings a message, it is distributed in the country of production and it is seen by the audience of that particular country; but those people have their own culture and they respond to the movie s message in their own way. Then that same film is dubbed to be delivered in other countries, to be seen by other people, who belong to other cultural systems. And this is exactly the point: how will the people of other countries respond to the film s message since this message belongs to a culture different from their one? How can this message be maintained unchanged in the transfer from the original movie to the dubbed one? This is the major challenge in the field of dubbing and this is the professional figure of the dialogue writer who firstly faces it. This professional figure has to deeply understand the message of the source film, he/she has to analyze not only its script, but all the other elements that have been used, such us: images, landscapes, particular movements of the actors or actresses and he/she has to constantly question himself/herself about the choices of the director. Why has the director choose that particular actor and no others? What does the director want to communicate? And once the dialogue writer has understood all this, he has to reproduce it into his/her own culture. The images and the structure of the film will remain the same in the dubbed version, so this figure has to play with the words and with the original script in order to readapt it. He/she has to communicate the original message to another audience, but this message should not be trivialized or changed, but be interpreted and delivered again. 18

19 The dialogue writer is a mediator for the target audience, the mean through which the target audience will get into contact with a foreign film. The audiovisual translation, in particular the film translation is a field in continuous progress, because the various cultures (both a source culture and a target one) are not static, they evolve every single day and the way they are transferred from a language into another evolves with them. A film dubbed different years ago, would be probably dubbed in a different way today, because the cultures evolve during the years. What makes the difference today is the phenomenon of globalization, thanks to which every culture is brought into contact with the others and the process of evolution is faster than ever. In this framework the practice of dubbing should create bridges between cultures, not barriers. 19

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