Intercultural Memories

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Sometimes people need a story more than food to stay alive.

(Barry Lopez)

Thursday, March 5, 2009

The VO dilemma--version originale vs voice over

This week I have been trying to get caught up on cinema after a long drought. Most theatres here have synchronized films, but I recently discovered one that shows VO with subtitles. I much prefer the latter. Even though I can follow a film in a number of languages, I feel that synchronization, besides giving bad lip synch, often betrays or loses the perspective on meaning and feeling and culture that are conveyed by tonality in the original language even if I can't understand the language that the characters are speaking. 

Let me give you an example. A few years back a friend and I went to Cannes to see Tim Burton's storytelling masterpiece Big Fish. The film was synchronized in French. We ran out of hankies and kleenex! A couple weeks I joined up with my colleague Kate to do a piece of work in the Paris area. Having an afternoon off we decided to go to the movies together. Kate had heard about and wanted to see Big Fish. I said that I had seen it but found it so good that I wouldn't mind at all seeing it a second time. This time it was presented in VO. It was an entirely different film. It still called for a five hankie rating, but now the regional Alabama accent was audible and the nuances and word play enriched the experience. 

Of course, subtitles can betray the sense as well, but normally they don't diminish the immediacy as much as synchronization. A tip--if you go to Bruxelles, expect only to see the top half of the movie screen--the bottom half is covered up with French, Flemish, and English subtitles if the film is in a fourth language!

1 Comments:

Anonymous Marc said...

Stanley Kubrick had a great trick about subtitles: he had the subtitles done by one team, and then translated back into English by an entirely different team. And back and forth until he was fully satisfied...Only Stanley could do that owing to his status, since that procedure added large costs and release delays, but as far as I can judge Kubrick's films French subtitles are almost perfect.

June 26, 2009 at 2:06 PM  

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