For an Abusive Subtitling

Film Quarterly, Un. of California Press, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Spring, 1999), pp. 17-34.

Abe Mark Nornes

Who is he?
Chair of the Department of Screen Arts & Culture and Professor in Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan, 1996 - to present. y Some books: -A Research Guide to Japanese Cinema Studies. -Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema. -Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary Film -Japanese Documentary Film: From the Meiji Era to Hiroshima
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First
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No one has ever come away from a foreign film admiring the translation.

All of us have, at one time or another, left a movie theater wanting to kill the translator. Our motive: the movie's murder by "incompetent" subtitle. (1.30)

Subtitles: What for?

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1) Enable viewers to understand a movie even if they do not know its original language. 2) Facilitate the export of audiovisual products to other countries (Tomaszkiewicz in Mijas); 3) Serve as linguistic approximations of meaning (Curti).

Basic Knowledge
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Nothing is simple when it comes to subtitles. Ten codes to consider: linguistic, paralinguistic, musical mode and special effects, sound arrangement, iconographic, photographic, planning, mobility, graphic, syntactic (Chaume in Incalcaterra).

Technique
The number of spaces available for text depends on the format of the film (16mm, 35mm), the lens (1:33, 1:85, Cinema Scope), etc

More technique
Four key elements to analyze frames (Taylor in Incalcaterra): Visual image, Kinesic action, Soundtrack, Subtitle. - Visual image includes camera position (CP), horizontal/vertical perspective (HP/VP), visual focus (VF), distance of shot (D), visually salient items (VS), visual collocation (VC), colours (CR)
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Translator/Subtitler Translator/Subtitler
Translation as a digestible package that easily supplants any ideological baggage carried by the original film. y Freedom to diverge from the original text unavailable to the typical translator (Lewis). y The translator usually forgets that subtitling is not only about dialogues but there are other important factors, such as dialects, cultural elements, register, which frequently undergo reduction, may be equally important for the comprehension of the film (Mijas).
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Subtitles: Strategy
Intimate part of film itself; not just a transposition; creating something new. y Debate: representational accuracy, fidelity, and authenticity (Curti). y Nornes and Ciceros two strategies of translation: -Sense-for-sense: lines basic meaning translated into another language. -Word-for-word: Importance of the materiality of language as opposed to some essential meaning found behind the letter. y What if they match? (Ivano)
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Subtitles: (some) Technique

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(Mijas) Omission (3.05-3.55): Sometimes unavoidable because of space constraints or because the target language does not have an equivalent term (Mijas). Explicitation: Translating what the author meant. Source text more accessible. I called 911 - I called for an ambulance You smell like Listerine - You smell like antiseptic mouthwash It was right before Labour Day - It was right the end of August

Subtitles: Technique 2
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Transposition: Cultural concept from one culture replaced by a cultural concept from another. - Smells like Wendys - Smells like McDonalds

Conspiring
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Conforming the original to the rules, regulations, idioms of the target language and its culture. Subtitlers conspire to hide acts of violence through codified rules and a tradition of suppression.

Trinh T. Minh-ha reduces the foreign tongue to nothing more than a cultural disadvantage where dubbing is perceived as a strategy of empowerment.

Corruption
All subtitles are corrupt because differences between languages can not be overcome. y The act of translation violently appropriates the source text. y Dubbing as an exchange of one voice for another which produces a new text free of the constraints because there is no debt to an original (Ascheid in Nornes). y Subtitlers have developed a method of translation that conspires to hide its work from its own readerspectators. [And] in this sense we may think of them as corrupt.
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Corrupt Vs Abusive
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Corrupt subtitlers disavow the violence of the subtitle while abusive translators revel in it.

Research: Something New

Subtitling has been virtually ignored (Nornes). y Incalcaterra - Un. of Galway - Pilot course in 20062007 - Seven students. y The aim of this short course was not, obviously, to train professional subtitlers, but to improve translation skills in advanced language learners (Incalcaterra). y The relevance of subtitling to the acquisition of translation skills is justified by the notion that it creates a stage, a pause for reflection (Incalcaterra).
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[] how the finest translators can be nurtured [] from the twin forces of rationalization and domestication. (Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema, 230)

Works Cited
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Curti, Giorgio Beating words to life: subtitles assemblage(s) capes, expression. Geo Journal 74.3 (2009): 201-208. McLoughlin, Laura Incalcaterra. "Subtitles in Translators' Training: A Model of Analysis." Romance Studies 27.3 (2009): 174-185.

Mijas, Hanna A New Approach to Translating Culture in Subtitling. Respectus Philologicus15.20 (2009): 53-61. Nornes, Abe Mark. For an Abusive Subtitling. Film Quarterly, Univ. of California Press, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Spring, 1999), pp. 17-34.