Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  These two adjectives juxtaposed imply a missing noun between them, and the absent word is obviously traductions, “translations.” At bottom, the phrase les belles infidèles says only “beautiful free translations.” However, French adjectives preceded by an article (a, the) can also be taken as nouns, just like “the poor” or “the unwashed” in English. So because its form is feminine and plural, les belles can also mean “[the] beautiful women,” and the whole phrase, les belles infidèles, read that way around, may be taken to say “beautiful women who cheat.” This construction of the phrase allowed for the invention of another adage that has burdened translation commentary ever since. Translations, this saying goes, are like women. Si elles sont belles, elles sont infidèles, mais si elles sont fidèles, elles ne sont pas belles—“If they are good-looking, youcan’t trust them to be faithful, and if they stick by their mates, it’s because they’re old frumps.” That’s a fairly free translation by conventional standards, but it is exactly what the adage implies (while also being translatable in its other dimension as “Aesthetically pleasing ones are adaptive, and nonadaptive ones are just plain”). The shadow of such sexist nonsense falls even today upon a French publishing house with an otherwise admirable list of translated works—Les Belles Infidèles.

  Sexist language has been the object of long and mostly successful campaigns in France as in the English-speaking world, but only rarely has it been observed that outside the context of politeness as it was understood in the French seventeenth century, les belles infidèles, whether used as a three-word catchphrase or in the longer adage that was built from it, is an insult to women. Most people let it pass because they think it is a statement about translation. It is not. It’s about male anxiety—to the point of misogyny. It applies to translation, I suspect, only because, like other versions of the betrayal motif, it says just how frightening translation can seem.

  Some critics have argued that a good translation is one that is faithful to its source. The corollary would be that a bad one counts as some kind of a betrayal and therefore justifies to some degree the worn-out and disreputable clichés we’ve tried to demolish. The corollary would be plausible if we knew what we meant in saying that a faithful translation is a good one. Why indeed is the term faithful applied to translation at all? True, a good spouse is a loyal one, and a decent spy is not a traitor. We also used to ask of servants and family retainers that they be faithful to their masters. But translators aren’t married to their originals, nor do they work for the CIA. The repeated insistence on “fidelity” as a criterion of quality in translation has certainly led many to describe themselves as servants of their originals. In so doing, they reenact the historical and prehistoric origins of their profession—the exercise of skills possessed by slaves.

  Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1880. Time to move on.

  TWELVE

  Custom Cuts: Making Forms Fit

  Chinese people love to pass around shunkouliu on oral grapevines. These are satiric rhythmical sayings, often consisting of quatrains with seven-syllable lines. The regularity of the form is audible and also visible in writing, because each Chinese character corresponds to one syllable. Here’s a jingle of that kind:

  Compact, patterned, dense, allusive, bitter, and humorous … translating a shunkouliu is a tall order. So why bother to try? Yet despite the odds, this barbed rhyme about New China’s old guard can be tailored into a pleasing and meaningful shape in a language completely unrelated to its original tongue. Here’s how it can be done, step by step.

  1. Translated character for character

  Hard hard bitter bitter four ten years

  One morning return to untie release before

  Already thus return to untie release before

  Just-at year change fate in-fact for whom?

  2. Translated group for group

  Strenuous, strenuous forty years

  One morning return to before Liberation

  Given that return to before Liberation

  In those days revolution in fact for whom?

  3. Explanation, sense for sense

  An extremely strenuous forty years

  And one morning we [find ourselves having] returned

  to before Liberation

  And given that we’ve returned to before

  Liberation

  [We might ask] who, in fact, the revolution back in

  those days was for.

  4. Plain translation

  An extremely strenuous forty years

  And suddenly we’re back to before Liberation

  And given our return to before Liberation

  Who, in fact, was the revolution for?

  5. Adding some rhythm

  An extremely strenuous forty years

  And suddenly we’re back to ’forty-nine,

  And since we’ve gone back to ’forty-nine

  Who, in fact, was it all for?

  6. Matching words to Chinese syllables

  For forty long years ever more perspiration

  And we just circle back to before Liberation

  And speaking again of that big revolution

  Who, after all, was it for?

  7. Adding rhyme

  Forty long years crack our spine

  Back we go to ’forty-nine

  Since we go to ’forty-nine

  Back then who was it all for?

  8. First polish

  Forty years we bend our spine

  And just go back to ’forty-nine

  And having gone to ’forty-nine

  Whom back then was this for?

  9. Adaptation, with double rhyme

  Blood sweat and tears

  For forty long years

  Now we’re back to before

  Who the hell was it for?

  10. As a word rectangle (6 × 4)

  We had sweat, toil, and tears

  For more than forty bloody years

  Now we’re back to square one

  For whom was it all done?

  11. Isogrammatical lines (21 × 4)

  Blood sweat and tears

  Over forty long years

  Now it’s utterly over

  Who stole the clover?

  12. Sounded out in Chinese

  Xin xin ku ku si shi nian

  yi zhao hui dao jie fang qian

  ji ran hui dao jie fang qian

  dang nian ge ming you wei shui

  What’s been done in the later versions of this translation is to exploit the flexibility of English to simulate artificially the patterned visual effect of a script whose appearance naturally represents patterned sound. Counting characters and spaces along the line isn’t usually considered a translator’s task, but it’s really just one variant of the need in a whole variety of fields to make words fit shapes.

  Strip cartoons are not redrawn when they are translated, and of the four-color plates used, only the black-and-white one with the lettering is remade for international sales. The cartoon translator has to make his version fit physically into the bubble spaces left blank by the three other plates. A very small amount of flexibility is provided by being able to alter the size of hand-drawn lettering—but limits are set by the requirement of legibility. The cartoon translator also has very little freedom to move meanings around between frames, since the captions must fit the picture, right down to the details of what the depicted characters are doing with their arms and hands. If you thought translating Proust might be difficult, just try Astérix:

  The “Breton” cousin of the Gaulish heroes speaks a parody of schoolbook English in French, with word-for-word renderings of “I say,” “a bit of luck,” and “shake hands.” Moreover, his name, Jolitorax, is a pun on “fair chest,” “pretty thorax,” which is not remotely funny in English. The translator Anthea Bell deftly reinstates the caricatural nature of the representation of English in French by inserting “Oh” and “old boy,” and she substitutes a rather better pun of her own for the name. Doing all that with
in the confines of a physical space that can take only so many letters makes this translation an exploit, a victory over language itself. But only slightly lesser feats are performed every day by professionals and amateurs the world over who translate Japanese manga into English or Belgian graphic novels into Portuguese, and so on. Graphic translation is much bigger business than literary fiction and probably rivals the translation of cookbooks in volume and turnover. Studying translated captions of works of this kind is an education in the flexibility of human languages and human minds. Nothing ever fits easily, but in the end a really surprising amount of form and content can be made to fit external constraints of nonlinguistic (bubble size) and paralinguistic (gestural) kinds.

  Subtitling is a smaller business, but the skills it engages are of the same kind. It has become conventional to regard average moviegoers as capable of reading only about fifteen characters per second; and in order to be legible on a screen as small as a television set, no more than thirty-two alphabetic characters can be displayed in a line. In addition, no more than two lines can be displayed at a time without obscuring significant parts of the image, so the subtitler has around sixty-four characters, including spaces, that can be displayed for a few seconds at most to express the key meanings of a shot or sequence in which characters may speak many more words than that. The limits are set by human physiology, average reading speeds, and the physical shape of the movie screen. It’s really amazing that it can be done at all.

  A further constraint on subtitling is the convention that a subtitle may not bleed across a cut: if you have someone chatting to his neighbor on an airplane seat and then a cut to a shot of the plane landing, for example, the subtitle must disappear at or just before the cut, and the following caption may not appear before the next audio sequence begins. Consequently, a film has to be decomposed into the “spots” in which subtitling may occur. The delicate job of “spotting” (made a lot easier if the film distributor can provide a transcript of the voice track) may or may not be done by the translator hired to write the captions. Usually, at least two people are involved. It follows almost automatically from this that subtitles do not offer a translation of all the words spoken, and in particularly fast-talking films they can offer only a compression or a résumé.

  Stringent formal constraints in film translation are believed to have had important retroactive effects on original work. Filmmakers dependent on foreign-language markets are well aware of how little spoken language can actually be represented in on-screen writing. Sometimes they choose to limit the volubility of their characters to make it easier for foreign-language versions to fit all the dialogue on the screen. Ingmar Bergman made two quite different kinds of films—jolly comedies with lots of words for Swedish consumption, and tight-lipped, moody dramas for the rest of the world. Our standard vision of Swedes as verbally challenged depressives is in some degree a by-product of Bergman’s success in building subtitling constraints into the composition of his more ambitious international films. It’s called the “Bergman effect,” and it can be observed in the early films of István Szabó and Roman Polanski, too.

  The supposed Bergman effect in film may actually be only a “keyhole” example of a much wider modern trend. Steven Owen has argued that some contemporary poets from China, for example, write in a way that presupposes the translation of their work into English—and that all writing in foreign languages that now aspires to belong to “world literature” is built on writers’ effective internalization of translation constraints.1

  Subtitling into English is a very small part of the translation world because so few foreign films are screened in the United States. At present there are only two American companies that provide subtitling services (and neither of them do only that), and they rely on a loose network of translators whose main jobs are elsewhere. Paid derisory sums at piece rates, the tiny band of English-language subtitlers are among the least-loved and least-understood language athletes of the modern media world.

  In many countries, dubbing is preferred. It is rarely done into English nowadays, because American audiences insist on complete lip-synching, so that no trace remains of the foreignness of foreign-language films. To make a translation of speech such that when pronounced it matches the lip movements of the original speaker—measured in fractions of a second—is no trivial task. But it’s not only the microseconds that count. The translated dialogue is also constrained by facial gestures and movements of the body, even when those are not the customary accompaniment of the words spoken in the target language. The writers of dubbing scripts are not just athletes; they are world-class gymnasts of words—but almost never credited with their achievements in the English-speaking world.

  The popularity of English-language films worldwide means that most American and British films are dubbed in multiple versions for sale abroad. Dubbing skills are much more widely used and appreciated in German, Italian, Spanish, and many other languages. One result of this asymmetry that is quite perceptible on-screen is that perfect lip synchronization is not always felt to be necessary by non -English-language audiences. American and Brazilian soap operas broadcast on Russian television channels frequently have voice tracks that bleed (when dialogue continues beyond the point at which the characters’ lips stop moving)—but the voices of familiar actors are characteristically those of well-known “dub stars” in the target tongue. Everyone in Germany knows the voice of “Robert De Niro,” for example, and knows also whose actual voice it is—that of Christian Brückner, a prizewinning star among audiobook readers, too, nicknamed “The Voice” in the German-language media press. Meryl Streep’s German voice is that of Dagmar Dempe, for all her films; Gabriel Byrne has been voiced by Klaus-Dieter Klebsch throughout his career since 1981. German moviegoers would be discombobulated if Russell Crowe, in his next blockbuster appearance, didn’t have the voice that really is his—that of Thomas Fritsch.2 The French voices of Homer and Marge Simpson, Philippe Peythieux and Véronique Augereau, have their pictures in newspapers. 3 In this respect as in others, English speakers find in the language culture of almost any other country a truly foreign land.

  In Palestine, biblical Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language among Jews long before the Roman occupation. From perhaps as early as the fifth century B.C.E., Aramaic interpreters read out a translation of the words of the service sotto voce, just after or even while the rabbi was speaking or chanting the more ancient tongue. Eventually, the words of such Aramaic whisper translations (called chuchotage in the modern world of international interpreters) were written down, mostly in small fragments, and these targums now provide precious linguistic and historical records for scholars of Judaism. For contemporary rebroadcasts of British and American television soaps and comedy programs in Eastern and Central European languages, the targum device—low-volume voice-over translation—has been reinvented. Lectoring, as it is now called, often astounds English-language visitors to Poland or Hungary. It doesn’t make even a nod toward aural realism: a single voice speaks on behalf of all characters of both genders, and the original English-language sound remains clearly audible.

  Lectoring is obviously cheaper and quicker to do than dubbing, as it requires a smaller team of translators and performers. The high volumes of English-language media imported into the smaller European countries would make it difficult to find all the linguistic trapeze artists you would need to dub everything in lip synch while the shows were still “hot.” So lectoring is a rational solution—but its underlying justification is not economic at all.

  As in the synagogues of Palestine and Syria long ago, lectoring is done for people who view the original language as endowed with prestige. English is nowadays seen as a cultural asset and an object of desire. Lectoring allows English-language learners to check that they have understood correctly and to improve their English as they enjoy the film. The Hungarian viewer of The Colbert Report wants to experience authentic American comedy, and the lector—like an interpreter performing chuc
hotage at a high-level meeting of heads of state—serves primarily as a check on the viewer’s grasp of the real thing. How much of Colbert’s political satire can be truly grasped by a Hungarian viewer of a lectored episode is slightly beside the point: something gets through. Because the original has not been erased by translation, that something is better than naught.

  Lectoring makes no attempt to fit form to form. But in a medium of much greater cultural distinction than TV and film, even the wish to do so has been derided as futile and vain. Vladimir Nabokov is famous among students of translation for his thundering assault on the folly of trying to translate rhyme by rhyme. His notorious comments accompany his own annotated translation of Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. Any attempt to reproduce the wry, light, witty, and rhythmical movement of the special form of the sonnet Pushkin used, Nabokov declared, was bound to misrepresent the poet’s true meaning and was therefore to be abhorred. Nabokov’s views on poetry translation have colored many arguments in the translation-studies field with a peculiarly vituperative tone. What he said needs to be understood in context. It is unfortunate that Nabokov put his strong opinions in such absolute and radical terms as to distract attention from the real issues.