Audiovisual Language Translation (in Spain)

One of my favorite courses as a student at the Universidad de Sevilla was “Lenguajes Audiovisuales” (“Audiovisual Language”). The class focused on the processes of subtitling and dubbing for movies and television shows…which is sort of ironic because I really dislike dubbed movies (hearing dubbed voices is not experiencing the original actor’s abilities). Some of the films I saw in Seville included Prometheus, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The Butler, Saving Mr. Banks and Monuments Men. My host mom almost always watched dubbed American movies in the evenings and once in a while, I could figure out which movie she was watching from the next room based on the background music or certain excerpts of distinct dialogue such as, “You is kind, you is smart, you is important” from The Help.

Our professor was born in the U.S. but moved to Spain when he was very young. He attended the University of Granada and is now a professional translator. He’s worked on a number of subtitling projects such as the television shows, How I Met Your Mother, Glee, The West Wing, Bones and bonus features for Star Wars. The university wanted to discontinue our class after the first day due to lack of interest; but after hearing an introduction like this, the four of us would not accept a cancellation so we spent the next few days recruiting people and managed to save it!

Our first few classes included a short history of the film industry, Franco and subtitling/dubbing rules and techniques. Our professor also explained we would be learning a great deal of colloquial Spanish that we don’t learn in traditional classes (another big draw to save the class).

Spain has a few reasons for dubbing nearly all of their foreign films. The first reason is illiteracy. When films were first developing in the early 1900s, a large percentage of Spaniards were illiterate. For example, between 1920 and 1930, 25.29% of men and 40.57% of women could not read. The second big reason was dictator Francisco Franco. Franco controlled Spain from 1939 to 1975 and enforced a number of strict laws and censorship including one specifically for dubbing in 1941: El Ley del Doblaje. For instance, in the famous 1947 American classic Miracle on 34th Street, the Spanish dubbing changed the original dialogue from “My father and mother were divorced when I was a baby” to “My father died when I was a baby.” Why? In this case, divorce was strictly forbidden in Spain so there would be no trace of it during the film, no matter the changes it made to the story. Many years later, Spain is already accustomed to dubbed films which is why subtitled movies aren’t as common here as other European countries.

Fun Facts: Dubbing/Subtitling

• Often times the same dubbing actors will voice the same movie stars such as Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood.
• Dubbing a movie is much more expensive than subtitling as more people are involved: a translator, actors, editors…
• Subtitlers are paid for their creativity and thinking, not merely translating.
• The movement of the original actors’ mouths are taken into consideration for the dubbed script to synchronize them as best as possible. A dubbed script and a subtitled script may be slightly different from each other.
• Often times accents are lost in subtitles to maintain the message.
• Onomatopoeias vary between languages. For example, “woof” = “gua” and “ribbit” = “crock”. However, sounds such as “Ahh!” or “Ohh!” stay the same.
• Titles of movies differentiate to attract viewers. For example, The Sound of Music = Sonrisas y Lagrimas (Smiles and Tears…don’t ask me why) and Young Love = Jovenes Calentitas instead of a literal translation: Amor Joven.
• Since the translator/subtitler has access to the film or television show before anyone else, the quality of the recording is rather poor for copyright reasons. Often the translator will watch the program 2-3 times before finalizing the subtitles.

One of our first class exercises was to watch the short Tex Avery cartoon, Symphony in Slang (1951) to discuss the challenges translators face with idioms and slang from one language to another. The challenge with audiovisual language is the visual aspect. For example, one of the first lines in Symphony in Slang is “I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth.” Spanish has a phrase exactly equivalent to this, “Nací en cuna de oro” (instead of a silver spoon, it’s a golden cradle) but since the original film literally shows a silver spoon in the baby’s mouth, the translation doesn’t match up with the visual. Sometimes, cases like this are unavoidable. Other phrases in the short-film are lost in translation simply because they don’t exist in Spanish such as “I was all thumbs.”

If you aren’t bored to tears yet with this lengthy explanation of my class, there is still more!

The technical aspect of subtitling was a lot more complicated than I expected. There are a number of rules you have to work around. For instance, in Spain there is a minimum of one second and a maximum of six seconds for each subtitle. You also cannot have more than two lines on the screen at one time and each line cannot have more than thirty-eight characters (letters, spaces, punctuation, etc). Here is an example segment from a script of Scooby Doo:

15. 01:02:26.19 01:02:30:06  3.12  70
Yeah, that’s the International Dog Show.
It’s going on all weekend.

3.12 = time on the screen (3 is the number of seconds and 12 is the number of frames)
70 = the number of characters allowed (again, in 1-2 lines) for this sentence

So, a proper translation for this sentence would be:
15. 01:02:26.19 01:02:30:06  3.12  70
Sí, es la expo internacional canina. (36 characters)
Dura todo el fin de semana. (27 characters)

36+27 is 63 characters total which is less than 70 so it’s in the clear! If a line is too long when translated, that is when the creativity of the translator must kick in to decide what information is important enough to properly convey the meaning of the dialogue.

I have a whole new appreciation for the work that goes into this pocket of the film industry. I think many people don’t realize the effort and time it takes to translate or dub a film. Even though you can’t translate every detail from the original film or TV program, it is still the responsibility of the translator to do their absolute best to maintain the original emotions and message as best as possible.