There’s a famous story about Sam Peckinpah’s “Cross of Iron” sub-titled in French. The scene shows the troops in the trenches of the First World War, anxiously waiting for the order to charge. A rumbling sound is heard and one of the soldiers shouts out, “Tanks, tanks, tanks.” The sub-titles appear, “Merci, merci, merci.”
This is an extreme form of what can happen when TV programmes and films are dubbed or sub-titled to be shown to foreign language audiences, and so gain a wider exposure. The same could easily happen when the SABC has to produce programming in the northern and southern African languages. When SABC 4 and 5 come around, there is the prospect that 18 hours of new programming will have to be produced every day. That’s 6,500 hours a year. That’s the equivalent of 55 daily soaps a year. That would cheerfully occupy 55 new, large production companies (probably nearer a hundred medium sized companies). To put it into hard cash terms, that’s one billion rand a year in new programming (across the genres).
That amount of money just doesn’t exist, and a large amount of the new programmes will be re-versioned from existing programmes, merely by dubbing and sub-titling.
The technology of dubbing and sub-titling is scary enough. But the real hurdle comes in translating. There’s no work here for the members of the Institute of Translators, who deal with legal and technical documents. In television and films, you don’t translate – you rewrite in the other language. You compose words and sentences in such a way that you convey the meaning, the sub-meaning and the implications of the other language.
Take this excerpt from Reservoir Dogs, “When daddy tomato is out walking with mommy and baby tomato, shouts at baby tomato not to lag behind. Finally he loses his temper and stamps his foot on baby tomato, saying, ‘I told you – ketchup’.”
This sentence is legendary in the film translator community, as no one has succeeded in either dubbing or sub-titling it. You get the drift. Every language has its own idiom, metaphors and imagery. In fact different cultures from the same language will have different idiom and metaphor.
A famous translator from English to French, who specialises in youth street programmes regularly consults youth on the streets, asking them, “What’s your expression for this – today.”
Do we have the translators who are also rewriters? You can rewrite a programme in order to capture the original culture, or you can rewrite it to transfer the culture as in the 1970s when the SABC dubbed “The Sweeny” into Afrikaans and captured the Afrikaans rather than the cockney culture. It all depends on what your intention is.
Just to make it more complicated, all languages differ from each other in the number and length of the words it takes to translate the meaning. Yet the duration of the dialogue on the film or videotape is fixed by the editing. The re-writer has to find words that fit into the same time frame. Quite a job.
But we need the skills. These skills cannot be imported, we need people fluent in the local languages and cultures, but people who are also creative writers. Now here’s an opportunity for a school to make good money!
Howard Thomas has been working in entertainment and media for 36 years. His experience with TV started from the beginning in South Africa, and he is now a media business consultant, trainer and specialist in audience psychology.