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9 Listening to the Inaudible Foreign Simultaneous Translators and Soviet Experience of Foreign Cinema Elena Razlogova For decades, Natalia Razlogova had a recurring dream: she enters a film translator’s booth and puts on the headphones. The audience is clamoring outside —they can hear the film, they demand the translation, but she hears nothing. She cannot translate; the foreign film is completely inaudible to her.1 This story conveys translators’ fears of failure: being unable to cope with shoddy technology , failing to relate to an alien culture, confronting an incomprehensible language . But most of all, it shows the fear of failing in their responsibility to their moviegoing public. Between the 1960s and 1980s, Soviet simultaneous translators made foreign-film screenings possible: at international film festivals, specialized theaters such as Moscow’s Illiuzion, and tours of foreign films organized by cultural and propaganda agencies. They simultaneously observed and shaped the Soviet moviegoing experience. The improvised voice of a simultaneous translator was a key element of the foreign-film sound track throughout the Soviet Union. What follows is an initial investigation into simultaneous translation of foreign films in the Soviet Union, centered on several interviews with and written memories of the earliest surviving simultaneous translators, who began their work in the mid-1960s. Four of the interviewees are my relatives: my grandmother , Kira Razlogova; my father, Kirill; and my aunts, Elena and Natalia. All of them were fluent in French because they had just returned after spending several years in France. Kirill began translating at the Moscow Graduate Director’s Program and from there was invited to join Illiuzion’s stable of translators. Razlogovs became the main translators from French at Illiuzion when it opened in 1966. I also interviewed Natalia Nusinova, who translated from Italian beginning in the early 1970s; Alexander Bondarev, who started as a translator at a Polish film retrospective in Illiuzion in 1969 while in graduate school in theoretical physics; and Grigory Libergal, who was a first-year college student when he began interpreting films for the Film History Lecture Series at the Filmmakers’ Union. He translated from English on the second day of Illiuzion’s existence. Many of the original Listening to the Inaudible Foreign | 163 legendary interpreters are now dead, including Nelia Nersesian (English), Maria Dolia (Japanese), and Alexei Mikhalev (Persian and English). But the surviving translators’ accounts convey the experience of interpreting and, to some extent, seeing and hearing a foreign film in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.2 To understand the historical specificity of simultaneous translation in the 1960s and 1970s one only has to compare it to contemporary translation standards . Audiovisual translation manuals now focus on dubbing and subtitles.3 The few practitioners who consider simultaneous screen translation specifically take the existence of subtitles or a script for granted and recommend that translators prepare by previewing the film several times, reading and translating the script, and taking notes. “In eight years of experience of translating films at the Venice Film Festival,” David Snelling wrote in 1990, “I have never been required to interpret a film directly from the sound-track without either sub-titles or a copy of the script. I would in any case consider the task impossible for a variety of reasons.” Snelling and other translation scholars have also recommended a minimalist approach to interpreting: one should condense phrases to their essential meaning and rely on the visual context to convey local turns of phrase and passions of the moment. “The interpreter is not an artist,” Snelling declared. “He is an artisan . . . a modest comprimario whose discretion and professional skills are best displayed when he least intrudes upon his listening public.”4 Not so in the 1960s and 1970s, at least in the Socialist bloc.5 Translators more often had to interpret the film cold, without a preview, script, or even subtitles. A fully bilingual simultaneous translator from the German Democratic Republic reported in 1975 that in such cases he helped himself by imitating gestures and facial expressions of the movie character he was translating at the moment, to his listeners’ surprise. “It is hard for non-translators to understand,” he explained, “that my head does not produce automatically (as you have to with speedy translation ) the perfect word if I translate two opponents’ heated discussion or selfconscious character’s meandering interjections in a boring steady voice, without tuning in to the ‘wave’ of the emotions of the phrases’ author.”6 Far from advising minimalism, one Russian specialist insisted in 1978...

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