Notes Introduction 1. The English translation is that provided in the subtitles to the UK Region 2 DVD release of the film. 2. The rewarding of Christoph Waltz for his polyglot performance as Hans Landa at the 2010 Academy Awards recalls other Oscar- winning multilin- gual performances such as those by Robert de Niro in The Godfather Part II (Coppola, 1974) and Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice (Pakula, 1982). 3. T h is u nder st a nd i ng of f i l m go es bac k to t he era of si lent f i l m, to D.W. Gr i f f it h’s famous affirmation of film as the universal language. For a useful account of the semiotic understanding of film as language, see Monaco (2000: 152–227). 4. I speak here of film and not of television for the sake of convenience only. This is not to undervalue the relevance of these questions to television, and indeed vice versa. The large volume of studies in existence on the audiovisual translation of television texts attests to the applicability of these issues to television too. From a mimetic standpoint, television addresses many of the same issues of language representation. Although the bulk of the exempli- fication in this study will be drawn from the cinema, reference will also be made where applicable to television usage. 1 Mimesis and Film Languages 1. There are, of course, examples of ‘intralingual’ translation where films are post-synchronised with more easily comprehensible accents (e.g. Mad Max for the American market). This recalls the silent-era practice of altering the intertitles for American films distributed in the UK (Maltby and Vasey 1994). 2. The practice never entirely stopped, however; it was a feature of European co- productions in the early 1950s (Jäckel 2003), and there have also been recent experiments in India. 3. Figures vary widely from country to country. Average costs across Europe are €2,700 to subtitle a film and €31,300 to dub it (Media Consulting Group and Peacefulfish 2007). 4. Cf. Betz (2001). There are, as Betz points out, distinctions to be made here between ‘art film’ and popular genres such as spaghetti Westerns, kung fu movies and anime, which have traditionally been screened in dubbed ver- sions for English-speaking audiences. 5. Cf. also Eisenschitz (1999: 32). 6. The film’s dialogue was designed to be unsubtitled for Anglophone and Japanese audiences, but was fully subtitled or dubbed in other territories. 204 Notes 205 7. For a fascinatingly detailed account of the script and documentary trans- lation processes for the US–Japanese co- production Tora! Tora! Tora! see Nornes (2007: 38–52). 8. It is worth noting that this was a question even before the arrival of sound; see Nornes (2007: 97). 9. See the Introduction for a gloss on the use of ‘foreign’ language here. 10. John Ford famously used Navajo actors to portray other Indian tribes, but the practice is also present in more recent cinema: in Last of the Mohicans (1992) Wes Studi, a Cherokee actor playing the Huron character Magua, speaks Cherokee throughout, and Russell Means, a Sioux actor playing the Mohican Chingachgook, speaks Lakota rather than Munsee Delaware (Marubbio 2002: 151–152). 11. In this case the actor playing Sean is simply speaking in random babbles; similar effects can be achieved by running the dialogue track backwards, or by otherwise distorting it. For an extended version of this device see Coupling, series 1, episode 5, ‘The Girl With Two Breasts’ (09/06/00). 12. Jack Hawkins, who plays the film’s chief villain Colonel Galcon, is critical of the ‘quite absurd’ waste of money, time and effort involved: ‘I am ashamed to say I never mastered it, and when I did grasp the pronunciation I forgot the words. Much of the action took place in my office ... and I was able to overcome the problem by having my lines written in “top secret” files, on the blotter on my desk, and on “official bulletins” pinned around the wall telephone’ (Hawkins 1973: 95). 13. I distinguish here, of course, between heterolingual intertitles reflecting multiple diegetic languages and bilingual or multilingual intertitles aimed at polyglot audiences (see e.g. Nornes 2007: 106–108). 14. I follow Meek (2006) in using ‘Injun’ as opposed to ‘Native American’ or ‘American Indian’ to refer to the set of representative clichés characteristic of Hollywood representations of Native Americans. 15. The film was eventually shot in Italian. 16. The role of sound mixing has yet to be studied in relation to foreign lan- guages on screen but is a promising avenue of research. 17. Verbal transposition is also found, of course, mimetically representing non- native- like language use. A notable recent example is Everything is Illuminated (Schreiber, 2005). 18. Alfred Hitchcock, for one, found it an unedifying experience. In 1930 he shot a multiple language version in English and German (Murder!/Sir John greift ein! [aka Mary]) and found that although he spoke German ‘I didn’t know cadences of speech ... and I was lost on the set. The actors sounded colloquial to me, but I really couldn’t understand what they were saying’. An improvisational approach to the translation of the script also created problems: ‘I would explain the meaning of the scene to the actors and sug- gest that they make up their own dialogue ... The result wasn’t good: there was too much faltering’ (McGilligan 135–136). 19. Arnold’s source novel features a good deal of explicit attribution. The use of vehicular matching in films based on literary properties would seem to merit further research. 20. In a more recent study Jacquelyn Kilpatrick observes astutely that while the linguistic policy of the film, unusually, confers full articulateness on 206 Notes Cochise and the other Apache, Jeffords’s fluency in Apache is implausible and fundamentally disingenuous (1999: 58–59). 21. Again, non-naturalistic narratives may be more comfortable with such effects; see e.g. the 1980s British situation comedy ’Allo ’Allo, in which the dissonance between narrative English and narrating English is used to great comic effect. 22. This lack of subtitling is a strategic decision, at least according to the undated ‘shooting draft’ of the film available at www.dailyscript.com (Spanglish shooting draft script, p. 1). 2 The Dream of Instant Translation 1. See Paul Ricoeur (2006: 8–10) on the necessity of renouncing the ‘fantasy of perfect translation’ in order to come to terms with and welcome the foreign. 2. See also R. John Williams’s article ‘Global English Ideography and the Dissolve Translation in Hollywood Film’ which came to my attention at a late stage in the preparation of this manuscript. 3. Interestingly, a Chinese colleague tells me that the Chinese script carries the meaning its bearer ascribes to it, rather than the manipulated meaning ascribed to it by the English ‘translation’. 4. For example, the homage use in the 1967 film Thoroughly Modern Millie, set in the 1920s. 5. In fact, only the first three chapters of the novel reproduce the Kita¯b, but the novel deliberately blurs the dividing line between the source texts, cast- ing the whole narrative as an edition of a single manuscript, and buttressing this with paratextual apparatus including a detailed introduction and copi- ous footnotes. 6. As Kitching explains (2002), Norwegian was chosen over Swedish, which would have been appropriate to represent an eastern Scandinavian language variety, because Swedish intonation patterns are perceived in the United States as odd. 7. The scenes of language learning were substantially edited down from the material originally scripted and shot. As a result, the length of time represented by the campfire scenes was unclear to many viewers and some commented on the implausibility of Ibn Fadlan picking up Norse ‘overnight’. 8. In McTiernan’s DVD commentary to the Special Collector’s Edition of The Hunt for Red October, the director cites Kramer’s film as the inspiration for his use of the translating close-up. 9. It is interesting to compare the treatment in Terrence Malick’s version of the Pocahontas narrative The New World (2005), which includes an extended account of language contact and language learning, and the rather more perfunctory treatment in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) which also draws heavily on the Pocahontas narrative. 10. Bhuvan and his friends speak Hindi. The English subtitles are given in square brackets. Notes 207 3 Before and Beyond Subtitles 1. Sound quality is a not uncommon issue with foreign languages on screen, and was a challenge in carrying out some of the dialogue transcription for this book. 2. ‘The spoken word is most cinematic if the messages it conveys elude our grasp; if all that actually can be grasped is the sight of the speakers’ (Kracauer 1997: 107). 3. The viewer’s inability to distinguish between a ‘real’ language and a com- petently produced invented language prompts the flippant remark by one French reviewer of Jacques Sévérac’s early sound film Sirocco (1930), which featured unsubtitled Arabic dialogue, that ‘the language was gibberish invented for the film’ (quoted in Slavin 1998). See also pp. 18, 205, n10 for examples of the use of one language to represent another, particularly in the case of indigenous languages. 4. Interestingly, a French subtitled version of the film does translate for the viewer at this point, radically rewriting our experience of the film (reported in Cahiers du cinema 154, April 1964, p. 48). 5. Its existence is supported, for instance, by the strong evidence that watching subtitled films and television promotes language learning, particularly in relation to lexis (cf.