“In the beginning was the word” is a statement that does not quite apply for the movie industry. This is due to the fact that cinema was born at the end of the 19th century, meaning that movie productions were mostly silent, which would continue for the first few decades of the 20th century. There was no music or dialogue in these movies since technology had not reached that level of development yet. However, they were accompanied by other types of elements, such as external music (a piano, organ or orchestra) which followed along with the film. They also included intertitles, which were slides that appeared between scenes or in the middle of a scene in order to provide contextual information for the spectators. You might think that in comparison with today’s industry, silent cinema might seem slightly rudimentary, but back in 1900 they were able to make high-quality films that even today are incredibly prestigious among movie experts. At this point in history, it was not hard to bring content to other countries since the only parts that had to be translated were the titles and intertitles.
With time, technology became more advanced and sound started to be included in movies, which until the end of the 1920s was limited to a simple soundtrack or some sound effects. In 1927, The Jazz Singer came out, which was a musical comedy that alternated between mute dialogues and spoken dialogues, which eventually became known as a part-talkie, in contrast to movies whose dialogues were completely spoken, which became known as talkies.
This new era brought new difficulties related to exporting movies abroad. The textual material at the beginning of the century was still minimal, but then longer films started to be produced that had extensive dialogues. This brought up an important question: what were the best strategies to bring them to other cultures? In the end, they found two solutions, subtitling and dubbing.
Although in the beginning there was a certain balance between both strategies, each country ended up choosing one or the other depending on its economic means and cultural circumstances. Thus, France, Italy and Germany dubbed movies while in Portugal, Holland, Greece or Scandinavian countries subtitles were used.
The situation Spain is at the very least worth mentioning. At first, they tried to use subtitles, but the Spanish-speaking audience had difficulty getting used to them. Then, in 1939 the arrival of Franco’s dictatorship changed everything since one of his goals was to make Spanish the most important language in the country, suppressing the rest of the national languages and reducing the use of foreign languages. His regime used dubbing to manipulate the contents of the movies shown in order to use them as propaganda, which is why they decreed that all movies in Spain needed to be dubbed in Spanish. A well-known example is Mogambo (1953) where they made the on-screen couple of Grace Kelly and Donald Sinden into siblings so they could hide the subject of adultery from the audience. As you can guess, this trend had a large impact as the years passed, since as Spanish audiences mostly consumed dubbed movies, they did not develop the same level of mastery of foreign languages as some of their neighbors, like in Portugal. On the other hand, the dubbing industry is much more developed, creating a market of professionals that is excellent in comparison to other countries. A well-known example is Mogambo (1953) where they made the on-screen couple of Grace Kelly and Donald Sinden into siblings so they could hide the subject of adultery from the audience. As you can guess, this trend had a large impact as the years passed, since as Spanish audiences mostly consumed dubbed movies, they did not develop the same level of mastery of foreign languages as some of their neighbors, like in Portugal. On the other hand, the dubbing industry is much more developed, creating a market of professionals that is excellent in comparison to other countries.
One style of dubbing worth mentioning is voice-over. Normally when a movie is dubbed, actors are chosen whose voice and interpretation fit the characteristics of the actors on the screen (age, gender, tone, etc.), substituting the original speaker with a recording. In voice-over, however, the new voice is heard over the original voice, which is also reproduced with a lower volume. Additionally, the text is read by a single voice which is responsible for providing the dialogues of all the characters, and there is no interpretation. In fact, the duration of the voice-over tends to be slightly shorter than the original voice which can still be heard.
This subset of voice-over started in the Soviet Union, where it was known as Gavrilov translation and was used to interpret movies for the state cinematographic committees or even for film festivals. At first, these interpretations were done live, but with the onset of VHS technology, they were recorded beforehand. The name comes from Andrey Gavrilov, one of the most important artists in that field at the time, whose name came to be associated with the technique. In fact, voice-over is still very common in Russia and Poland. In western countries, it is a known but lesser-used technique, usually limited to documentaries since it adds authenticity.
All these audiovisual translation strategies are valid and have a specific function. This is why it is so useful to have a wide variety of tools that let us adapt content to different cultures according to the needs of the original material and the target audience.
Information from the following links were used to write this article:
- https://traduversia.com/unit/1-introduccion-historica-sobre-la-traduccion-audiovisual/
- http://tavargentina.com/2017/09/el-rol-del-traductor-en-el-doblaje/
- https://hipertextual.com/2015/01/doblaje-castellano
- https://www.eldoblaje.com/varios/proceso.asp
- https://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/52035/1/Quaderns-de-Cine_10_07.pdf
Referencia de la imagen: https://www.diez.hn/otrassecciones/videojuegosytecnologia/930168-99/kamarada-una-app-para-grabar-cine-mudo
