Riassunto esame di Traduzione audiovisiva - Il doppiaggio e il sottotitolaggio, prof. Logaldo

Traduzione audiovisiva (sottotitolaggio e doppiaggio)

An introduction to audiovisual translation

Historical background

As we know, audiovisual texts are very complex semiotic texts, multimodal texts (sound, pictures, verbal contents, audio contents), so it’s very important to have a knowledge of the medium we’re going to work with.

The visual dimension of the moving pictures

We’ll now focus on the history of cinema. This is very important because we’ll realise that cinema was mainly considered as a visual medium: when we think about cinema now, we think about an audiovisual medium, so we pay attention to both oral and visual dimension of films. But, in the beginning, cinema was perceived basically as a visual medium. As we know, the first experiment was held in Paris by the Lumière brothers in 1896 and the film was called The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. It was very realistic, a sort of documentary film: people were scared because the illusion was so strong that they thought the train was actually arriving. The second most famous experiment was the one held in 1902 by Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon. This one was very different from the previous experiment, since it was very unrealistic with the shuttle getting into the eye of the moon. Nevertheless, the result was the same, because the wonder was in the medium, in seeing moving pictures, so pictures coming alive in front of the viewers’ eyes, no matter if the representation of reality was realistic or not.

While trying to describe the new medium, they tried to resort to other art forms. This is what the poet Vachel Lindsay wrote in The Art of the Moving Picture:

"[...] Japanese prints taking on life, animated Japanese paintings, Pompeian mosaics in kaleidoscopic but logical succession, Beardsley drawings made into actors and scenery, Greek vase-paintings in motion. [...] space measured without sound plus time measured without sound." - 1915

We can imagine what early films looked like. Now that we are in the digital era, films are considered as a continuum. At the time, they were actually sequences of snapshots: they were like sequences of photos physically cut and put together into a machine that could project them at very high speed; this made the illusion of movement possible. It gives us an idea of what a frame is: even today, when we work with software to make subtitles, we need to think in terms of frames. We have 25 frames per second: this is the general ratio. So, in order to perceive movement as a continuum, there must be at least 25 frames per second. This is very important because it gives us an idea of how to synchronize subtitles: it’s not just a matter of seconds, but frames per second. Synchronization has to be very precise: a subtitle, in fact, should start when the character on the screen starts speaking and it should end when the character stops speaking. So, going back to the origins of film and understanding what a frame is can be important also for our work as audiovisual translator. Now, from the description, films were considered as a sequence of snapshots which were then animated. The focus was on the visual aspect, as we can read in "space measured without sound plus time measured without sound."

The art of silence

Since the focus was on the visual aspect, cinema was actually considered as the art of silence. This is what Metz wrote in his Essais sur la signification au cinéma in 1968:

"[...] a subconscious attempt to speak without words, and to say without verbal language not only what one would have said with it (which is never entirely possible) but in the same way it would have been said."

At the time, actors were trying to act in a very dramatic way: they sort of overact because they had to express feelings through their gestures, facial expressions, postures. They had to express what was missing: the words and the sound.

On the other hand, we would be wrong if we thought that early films were totally silent. This is what Mario Verdone wrote in 1967 in Bianco e Nero, a film journal.

The emptiness of silence had to be filled in some way: the noise of the projector could not be easily tolerated, and the dynamism of the action demanded to be counterbalanced by some kind of sound effect.

What sort of sound was available at the time? There was usually piano music which accompanied the action, and in big cinema theatres there was a full orchestra with suitable music. Not everybody knows that there were other sorts of experiments: Fregoli, a quick-change actor (he played several roles one after another), had invented the Fregoligraph: what he did was dubbing the actors while the movie was being projected. He was standing behind the screen with a megaphone and he dubbed the voices of all the actors. So, when we think about silent films, we shouldn’t be thinking about films in which sound was totally absent, but we must think about films in which the synchronization of dialogue and picture was not yet technically possible. They were silent because the synchronization was not available at the time.

Literary intertitles

Of course, there were already subtitles. More often, films had intertitles between frames. Now, what sort of subtitles or intertitles were available at the time? When we think about subtitles, we think about texts that faithfully or at least as faithfully as possible reproduce what is being said in the dialogues. Most of the times, this was not the case with early subtitles. There were for example literary intertitles, as the ones used by D’Annunzio in his film Cabiria. As we can read, subtitles or intertitles were actually a literary exercise, so it had very little to do with what the actors were supposed to be saying; it was more about creating an atmosphere full of literary references.

There were of course some very experimental subtitles, as the ones in Turksib, a part of Kino Pravda, a movement developed in the 20s in Russian cinema, where films were very realistic. Even in this case, subtitles were more like a literary experiment, by trying to reproduce the experiments made in Futurism with very big words, by exploiting all the potentials of colours (black and white) and type size. So, there were mainly literary experiments close to the ones being made at the time by Futurist poets.

There were also few experiments in writing subtitles, a representation of what the actors were supposed to be saying while they were acting. This is an example of The Son of the Sheik in 1926:

This is an early example of subtitle in the modern sense of the word. They were still intertitles actually, and this also explains the structure and the division into lines. What do subtitles look like today? They consist of one or two lines at most; three lines are very rarely and should be avoided. Each line can contain up to 35-37 characters. We shouldn’t find subtitles like this one for example: each line is very short, and we have three lines.

Language of film (semiotic perspective)

As we said, emphasis was placed especially on the visual aspect and, when they referred to cinema as a language, they mainly referred to it as the language of editing. According to this perspective, each frame could be compared to a phoneme (a letter), each shot to a word, each scene to a sentence. So, according to this early semiotic view, the grammar of films was the editing of films. Now, this idea is completely wrong: films are not comparable to verbal language as we know it. It was still the idea of film as a language from a semiotic perspective, not from a closely linguistic perspective. According to the semiotic perspective, in fact, the grammar of film was the way frames, shots and scenes were organised in a film. This is to say that the emphasis was still on the visual, not on the dialogue. Even when dialogues were made available, even when sound film was introduced, scholars mainly thought about film as a visual medium whose grammar consisted of the organisation of frames, shots, scenes and sequences.

A new medium and discursive practice

Cinema was seen as:

• An apparatus of scientific or technology innovation: many people emphasised the novelty of the medium from a technical point of view, since it was considered as a big achievement of technology. Some of the titles of Italian film magazines of the times emphasised the scientific or technological aspect of the new medium.
• A new form of art, along with the other arts: it had the same right to be considered an art as painting, music, theatre etc. The point of view was on the artistic potentials.
• A new mode of mass entertainment: this was also clear from the very beginning. Cinema was considered as a new habit, as a new form of social practice.
• An instrument of education or social persuasion: dubbing was the result of the idea that cinema was a very powerful medium to convey ideas and also a very dangerous medium if it conveyed the wrong ideas. It’s very important to be aware that since the beginning cinema was considered a very powerful instrument of education or social persuasion. As we know, these are the decades which saw the advent of Fascism: Mussolini was the first one to be perfectly aware of the power of cinema. He actually founded the Istituto nazionale LUCE with the purpose of using cinema as an instrument of education or social persuasion.

The introduction of sound film in Italy

Now, by a strange coincidence, this was also the time in which sound film was introduced: the first film which contained dialogues that were synchronized to the images was The Jazz Singer by Alan Crosland, screened in America in 1927, then screened in Rome in March 1929. The reactions were very controversial: some said that it was a scandal, because cinema was still perceived as a visual medium and the acting belonged to the theatre; others were very enthusiastic about the new invention. However, everybody was perfectly aware that this represented an historic turning point.

Audiovisual translation and/as censorship in Italy

Now, some films introduced a big danger. The idea that danger contents could be conveyed through language could be kept under control when films were acted in Italy. What happened when the film was acted in English or other languages? How could the regime have control of the contents of films? This is why some films were accompanied by censorship in Italy from the very beginning. This is a directive from the Ministry of Education of 1930 and 1933:

"Il ministero dell’interno ha disposto che da oggi non venga accordato il nulla osta alla rappresentazione di pellicole cinematografiche che contengono del parlato in lingua straniera sia pure in qualche parte e in misura minima. Di conseguenza tutti indistintamente i film sonori, ad approvazione ottenuta, porteranno sul visto la condizione della soppressione di ogni scena dialogata o comunque parlata in lingua straniera. (D. R. del 22 ottobre 1930)"

"È vietata la proiezione nelle sale del Regno delle 7 pellicole cinematografiche sonore non nazionali ad intreccio di metraggio non inferiore a 100 metri il cui adattamento supplementare in lingua italiana (doppiaggio o postsincronizzazione) sia stato eseguito all’estero. (D.R. 5 ottobre 1933)"

They decided to either suppress the dialogues that were not in Italian or translate them and dub them, but only Italian translators could translate dialogues in foreign languages. This allowed the regime to have a control over the contents of the dialogues.

Objectives and effects of censorship on dubbing

The result of the policies created by Fascism in Italy was the introduction of dubbing; that is why dubbing is so important and such a widespread practice compared to other countries. It allowed the:

• Control over contents: not only controlling dangerous ideas - so a sort of "cleaning up" the dialogues from all the possible references to dangerous political ideas for example -, but also dangerous moral ideas or hints at lifestyles that were considered as dangerous (homosexuality). Any content or any dialogue that could jeopardize that idea of family was considered as dangerous. In translation, they tried to make it less explicit or sometimes they changed the contents.
• Preserving of the "purity" of the Italian language: we all remember that during Fascismo foreign words and expressions were not allowed. This is one of the reasons for which everything had to be translated into Italian.
• "Medietà e decoro": the idea that the language had to be something in-between informal and very formal, which was maintained even after Fascism. A sort of middle style and middle register, something that we still observe in dubbing.
• "Medium register" and "dubspeak": dubbing is very seldom casual or totally informal. It still complies with the idea that language spoken in dialogues should present a middle register and should be acceptable. Not many slang words or taboo words. It originated a long time ago and is still observable today, to the point that some people speak of a "dubspeak" (doppiaggese).

All the censorships and all the possible ways of controlling the translation of dialogues into Italian we’ve seen so far were indeed originated during Fascism, but they persisted after it. This is a dialogue from Rope, a film by Alfred Hitchcock dated 1947: the war was already over, and so was Fascism.

The film was still considered a little bit dangerous for its contents. It’s about two male students from university who killed a 14-year-old boy. This was a very strong kind of content in the first place. There was another one: the two murderers were homosexuals. In this dialogue, they’re talking about the murder and they’re trying to explain to each other what they felt when they killed the boy. The hint at the murder as a sexual experience is very strong in English. There’s a very explicit reference at the murder as a sexual intercourse: it was like a sort of orgasm, which one cannot describe because the sensations were so overwhelming, until something went limp.

If we have a look at the translation, it was definitely turned down: apart from impulse, there are no hints at the sexual intercourse. This is a characteristic that we may notice in Italian dubbing in general: even today there is a legacy of this tradition.

Attitudes toward dubbing

Even in this case, the reactions about dubbing were very controversial. Some thought it was an art, and one of them was Paolo Uccello, a journalist who wrote for Bianco e Nero, a journal very much aligned with the regime. For this reason, he could not criticize dubbing as a practice. On the other hand, he thought of dubbing in a very modern way by praising the art of dubbing and its techniques. He praised dubbing as a form of knowledge which makes a different culture accessible, so he compared dubbing to literary translation. He was as well aware that dubbing is also a result of economic reasons, since it is commerce driven: dubbing has become a tradition in Italy not only because of censorship, but also because we had from the very beginning a thriving market of audiovisual products. Small countries with a limited market could not afford it. Italy could because it had a very high demand for foreign films, especially Hollywood productions.

Why was dubbing preferred to subtitling in Italy? The level of illiteracy was very high until the...