Have you ever been to a foreign film or opera where you got the feeling you were missing the point of the story, or had been cheated of the poetry of the dialogue, poem, or lyrics because the subtitles or supertitles were badly translated? The first clue may be bad grammar or misspellings, as in “launch” for “lunch,” but not all poor translations leave that kind of footprint. More often, they simply render the film or the opera cheated of the power it has in its original language.
I recently saw Iran’s film submission to the Academy Awards, Today, at the Palm Springs Film Festival. It is a beautiful film about a taxi driver in Tehran and a young woman who gets in his taxi. She is pregnant, bruised from beatings, and in labor. What follows is a heartrending depiction of a sweet young woman dealing bravely and innocently with her lot in a man’s world, and a simple taxi driver’s capacity for compassion and kindness. It’s a film that rivals last year’s Academy Awards winner, A Separation—except for its subtitles. THEY SUCKED!
Didn’t the director, Reza Mirkarimi, care about translation? Was he clueless about how important subtitles are in a film in which every line matters? Or was he simply unaware that the translator of his film was unqualified for the task? When a film director, vocalist, or composer is focused on his or her own art, he or she must not forget that an audience unfamiliar with the language and culture of the work enters the film or the opera through the gate of translation.
For example, if you are presenting a musical about a poet and use translations of his or her work by different translators because this serves your production politically or financially, you render the poetic voice in translation uneven. In doing so you cheat the poet, who if dead cannot protect the integrity of his or her poems. You also cheat yourself by rendering your own production weak. When you have a beautiful, important film, and you pay no attention to its subtitles, in effect you are being unfair to your writer, your actors, your audience, and yourself as a director.
As we walked out of the movie theater, a woman behind me told her husband: I loved this film but I have a feeling I missed out on a lot of what characters were truly saying. I turned around and said: Yes, you did.
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