Cinema Babel

by Abé Mark Nornes
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, 2008
304 pp. illus. 31 b/w. Trade, $67.50; paper, $22.50
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5041-5; ISBN: 978-0-8166-5042-2.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu



The translator Toda Natsuko is famous in Japan, and TV shows feature onscreen jokes about the well-known subtitler and translator Toda Natsuko. Okeaeda Shinji subtitled over a thousand films for the Japanese audience, translating from French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and English; his US films included “Citizen Kane” in 1941 and “Star Wars” in 1977. Tanaka Katsue, Yamaouchi Etsuko are all quality translators cited for work on film festivals for over two decades. Outside Japan, the Czech film industry recognizes the importance of dubbing, gives awards for it. Yet the entire field of translation seems under-documented for such an important component of international cinema. University of Michigan’s Japanese scholar Abé Mark Nornes addresses translation and its myriad related issues. Nornes also explores screen graphic design issues, the legibility of subtitles vs. dubbing in the craft of interpretive and literal translation, all in the context of globalization and national cinemas.

His chapter “Interpretation with Attitude” examines distribution and exhibition in light of textual theory and linguistics, and how they impact preproduction, principal photography and editing. Interlingual subtitles are used on Japanese television, where the typography, its style and size are all significant and variable. Nornes favors certain instances of “abusive” subtitling, like the inventive animated cartoon titles on Japanese TV game shows that draw attention from the rest of the action onscreen. And Carl Macek is responsible for the anime boom in the United States, for he created 36 TV episodes for the United States market by stitching segments from three different Japanese cartoon series together with especially creative English translation.

Translation is politics. About 1930 the head of Fox Theater chain proclaimed that talking movies would bring the world “universal understanding” and “cosmic peace”, yet there’s been a continual struggle and negotiation between foreign markets and US market dominance. There were multilanguage versions of movies until about 1932, and the Spanish-language version of “Dracula”, starring Carlos Villarias and shot on the same sets as the English-language one, is reputed to be sexier than Bela Lugosi’s. Within nations, dubbing was always an issue where there were regional accents with negative connotations of provincialism.

The use of Afrikaans in a patriotic South African movie made in 1929 about the Voortrekkers was a nationalistic act in what was then part of the British Empire. In the 1930s, Japanese documentary cinema was influenced by Paul Rotha’s 1935 book in translation, which coincided with the imperial Japanese government’s own policies for documentary films affirming the merits of their “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”. The 1970 international co-production “Tora! Tora! Tora! remains memorable mainly for its history of studio translator interventions, manipulations, face-saving and jockeying for influence—a backstage drama starring the perfectionist director Kurosawa Akira and the sly translator Aoyagi Tetsuro. This friction is contrasted with the easy, respectful relationship in interviews between Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock and their translator Helen Scott.

There is also a chapter on the international phenomenon of film explainers, who grew out of the 19th century tradition of public lecturers with lantern slides. Called benshi in Japan, they flourished there from about 1910 to the sound era, and though the job declined in west in the 1920s, a few persisted in Japan to late 20th century. These oratorical performer-translators varied their explanations with the mood of each show, and embellished the story where the opportunity presented itself. As in the kabuki theater, many benshi like Sawata Midori were characterized by sing-song voices. A long-dead art? Here in our era of YouTube and IMAX, in July 2008, the storefront cinema ATA in San Francisco, California hosted a show “a neo-benshi cabaret presented by kino21”. Seven films with new scripts and sound effects from Los Angeles, Portland and the San Francisco Bay Area were presented. These contemporary presenters-qua-performers affirmed that they’d found their inspiration in the work of a Japanese performer of the silent era known as the Katsudo Benshi. The author of Cinema Babel, had he been in attendance, might have been amused.