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Chapter 1 Subtitling Film for the Cinema Audience Nothing is simple when it comes to subtitles; every turn of phrase, every punctuation mark, every decision the translator makes holds implications for the viewing experience of foreign spectators. However, despite the rich complexity of the subtitler’s task and its singular role in mediating the foreign in cinema, it has been virtually ignored. Abe Nornes, film subtitler, 1999 In 1930, a short three years after the popular introduction of “talking” motion pictures in the United States with the release of The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, a teenaged violin student in New York City named Herman Weinberg was working at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse to adapt the full-orchestral scores of foreign films to the smaller chamber orchestras of the US cinema. He soon found himself out of a job—not only had sound film enabled spoken dialogue, rather than pantomimed and printed on “intertitles” spliced between scenes, but it also allowed music to be recorded, rather than played live in the theater by musicians . Weinberg was luckier than the musicians he had scored for, however; because he knew German, the language of most imported films at that time, he was able to shift from adapting music to adapting dialogue, writing new intertitles for imported films that remained incomprehensible to English speakers without a textual translation. Yet intertitling was for Weinberg a clumsy solution to the languagetransfer problem, “not only silly but annoying,” and he longed for a better way to link sound, image, and text.1 Weinberg’s technological fix soon came in the form of the Movieola, a self-contained personal movie-viewer used for editing film. As he recalled , “It was like a miniature projection room. You could start and stop the film at will” and “measure not only the length of every scene but that of every line of dialogue.” The Movieola allowed Weinberg to create textual “subtitles” that would flow naturally with every scene instead of breaking into the action every few moments. Weinberg soon found a photographic laboratory that could create a “title negative ” out of these printed subtitles and, running them together with the original film, construct a new copy for exhibition. Armed with these new film-editing and production resources, and situated as he was in New York City—home to the greatest demand for film translation in the United States—Weinberg began to develop the rules of this new discipline of subtitling. “At the beginning I was very cautious and superimposed hardly more than 25 or 30 titles to a ten-minute reel . . . Then I’d go into the theatre during a showing to watch the audiences’ faces, to see how they reacted to the titles . . . This emboldened me to insert more titles, when warranted, of course, and bit by bit more and more of the original dialogue got translated until at the end of my work in this field I was putting in anywhere from 100 to 150 titles a reel.”2 Although studios would sometimes bring other subtitle translators to New York to work on films in less widely known languages such as Japanese, Weinberg continued to do the bulk of US subtitling work for decades. By the time he retired some fifty years later, he and his small company had subtitled some four hundred films in a dozen languages.3 What is surprising about Weinberg’s place in the history of subtitling is not the serendipitous combination of marketing need, production innovation, and labor practice in the New York film economy of the 1930s but the lack of explicit connections between his work and that of the other subtitlers who emerged around the same time—both the European professionals who subtitled American films for global cinema audiences and the American educators who began to subtitle donated Hollywood films for deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HOH) students. Subtitling was a practice carefully designed by its practitioners to meet the cultural needs of language translation, the economic needs of commodity distribution, and the artistic needs of cinematic integrity. However, this practice was often compromised by both technical and politicaleconomic constraints of time and space. Professional subtitling developed more or less independently in the “art houses” of Weinberg’s New York City and in the distribution centers of the “subtitling countries” in Europe, where the practice competed with the more expensive but less intrusive technique of postproduction revoicing, or “dubbing.” 18 Turning Speech into Text [3.143.168.172] Project MUSE...

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