Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (review)

In Cinema Babel, University of Michigan Professor Mark Nornes (Dual appointment in the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures) provides a history of key cultural and ideological shifts that have influenced media translation practices over the past century. Situating his approach between film studies and translation studies, a central theme of the book is the concept of global "traffic" which Nornes defines as being "qualitatively different than 'movement' or 'circulation' because it indicates regulation" (4). Nornes suggests that regulations in legislative forms such as tariffs, quotas, and censorship have dovetailed with a finely-tuned advanced system of production which privileges information and devalues other possible exchanges of meaning. Film translators, like those in other fields, are often presented as invisible and their role in the "violence" of translation is regularly obscured either actively or passively. In contradistinction to this commonsensical approach, Nornes argues a need for "abusive" translators, or who make their participation obvious in the production of meaning (25-27).

To this end, the book's six chapters examine the various functions of film translation, its history, and several key debates such as the subtitling versus dubbing debate. The first two chapters discuss the various roles that film translators play in such specific sites as television, film coproductions, and international film festivals. Nornes relates how the translator on the multimillion dollar U.S./Japan coproduction of Tora Tora Tora! (1970) brokered his power successfully reinventing himself as a producer and even eclipsing the status of legendary director Kurosawa Akira. In the next two chapters, Nornes further examines the notion of translator as gatekeeper by providing an institutional history of the Benshi or film narrator. Arguing that the cinema was global in nature from the beginning, Nornes claims that "increase in [film] traffic was accompanied by—and sometimes in synergy with—the graduate elaboration of cinematic narrative" and that the Benshi's role in integrating the new medium into established screen practice was an important transformation of the cinema (92-3). His discussion of the subtitling of early sound films in Japan highlights the fact that what translators chose not to translate was at least as affective to the overall emotional impact of a film as what was translated. Finally, Nornes problematizes the adoption of the two modes, subtitling versus dubbing, to resolve the problem of film translation by analyzing various ideological dimensions of both forms.

While theorizing on the role and function of translators is certainly not new as the author himself would admit, what is refreshing about Cinema Babel is the author's careful placement of film translation within a framework that recognizes both historical and theoretical demands. Some may be put off by the author's use of predominantly Japanese examples, but the argument here has a broad range of applications and makes an important contribution to the fields of film studies generally and Japan film studies in particular.