Translation&the Film.Defamiliarizing Effect of Translation.pdf

New Voices in Translation Studies 4 (2008), Special Conference Issue:

‘With/out Theory: The Role of Theory in Translation Studies Research’, UCL, UK, April 2008

Translation and Film:

On the Defamiliarizing Effect of Subtitles

Dionysis Kapsaskis

Roehampton University

ABSTRACT

This paper brings together aspects of film theory (Benjamin, Dayan) and translation

theory (Venuti, Nornes) in order to investigate some of the aesthetic and political

implications of subtitling. It sets out by comparing film and translation as distinct modes

of representation in which the wish for realism and authenticity is revealed and concealed

in equal measure. The paper then examines the ways in which this paradox complicates

the act of subtitling. It is argued that interlingual subtitles have a defamiliarizing effect

over both “dominant” and “peripheral” audiences. Subtitles give rise to perceptions of

foreignness which have to do with linguistic and cultural difference as well as with the

semiotic difference between the verbal and the audiovisual dimensions. However, even as

subtitles emphasize questions of alterity, the extent of editorial manipulation they

normally undergo is such that their potential for enhancing awareness of the foreign is

drastically restricted.

KEYWORDS: Film, Translation, Subtitling, Defamiliarization, Foreignness

Introduction

A lot of theoretical attention has been recently paid to the cultural, aesthetic, and political

implications of subtitling. Just as the study of translation reveals different ways in which

different linguistic communities historically see themselves and relate to each other, so the

study of subtitling helps us to understand such relationships in a contemporary context. In

particular, interlingual subtitling expresses and influences perceptions of foreignness in the

cultures that use it and simultaneously affects determinations of these cultures’ sense of

subjectivity. While the role of subtitles is to facilitate access to audiovisual products in a

foreign language, they at the same time raise questions about the ethno-linguistic identity of

those products as well as of their viewers. Watching films with subtitles can be considered as

a special identity-forming experience, in so far as such films constitute fields of tension

between their foreign and native elements, both of which are present at the same (film-

viewing) space and time.

In this paper, I intend to explore this tension and some of the ways in which it has been

addressed by film and translation theorists. In the first part, translation and film – the two

components of subtitling – will be discussed as separate forms of representation which open a

privileged and distinctly modern space for issues of alterity and identity to arise. The question

will then be asked whether this shared feature of translation and film extends to the ways in

which they have historically foregrounded or suppressed such issues. In the second part, I

shall look into the particular ways in which subtitling raises questions of foreignness and I

will refer to the opportunities for novel responses that subtitles offer as a result of their

singular semiotic makeup. I will suggest that subtitles have a defamiliarizing effect, in that

they call attention to the distance that separates viewers from foreign films. However, I will

Dionysis Kapsaskis: Translation and Film: On the Defamiliarizing Effect of Subtitles, 42-52.

New Voices in Translation Studies 4 (2008), Special Conference Issue:

‘With/out Theory: The Role of Theory in Translation Studies Research’, UCL, UK, April 2008

qualify this argument, by examining whether the defamiliarizing effect of subtitles actually

translates into an increased awareness of the presence of foreignness during and beyond the

film-viewing experience.

Translation, Film, Foreignness

Translation has always been about the experience of the foreign. However, perceptions of

foreignness vary dramatically from culture to culture, and indeed from one historical period to

the next. In the West, Enlightenment tradition has perceived foreignness as an inflection of

the dream of universal human identity, a perception still operative in various domains,

including the political. As Antoine Berman points out in his study The Experience of the

Foreign (1992), the moment when the foreign challenges the familiar, in whatever

constructive or aporetic fashion, can be located in (German) Romanticism. It was then, again

according to Berman, that questions of nationality and internationality, mother and foreign

tongue, properness and otherness acquired cultural relevance and philosophical urgency. The

German Romantics – Schleiermacher, Humbolt, Hölderlin – looked at translation as the

privileged practice in and through which these queries and themes could be accounted for in

relation to each other. Translation thus enters modernity as an intellectual space for the

thinking of modernity itself. Inasmuch as issues of linguistic, ethnic and cultural belonging –

or exclusion – inform the modern critique of Humanism and the Enlightenment, translation

becomes a paradigmatic discipline for modernity.

This can be seen in Heidegger’s understanding of translation as the movement by which “we

seek to win back intact the naming force of language and words” (Heidegger 2000:15).

Translation is considered by Heidegger as an attempt at restoring authentic significations by

removing layers of speculative interpretation of words such as physis and adikia through

history. For example, Heidegger claims that the Latin translation of the Greek word physis as

natura was “the first stage in the isolation and alienation of the originary essence of Greek

philosophy” (2000:14). According to him, this translation kicked off a historical process in

which attention was shifted from the spirituality of physis to the materiality and concomitant

scientism implicit in natura . Regardless of whether Heidegger is right on that particular point,

his understanding of translation as a constitutive historical force is typical of the emphasis that

modern philosophy and historiography placed on language. As Gentzler (1993:155-156)

argues, “Heidegger has progressed to the point Foucault suggests is characteristic of a certain

kind of twentieth-century thought: rather than any one person speaking, language is speaking

itself and man is listening”. Heidegger arrived at his own controversial translations from

Greek – e.g. adikia (injustice) as ‘disjunction’, al ƺ theia (truth) as ‘unconcealment’ – thus

suggesting that the process of setting historical misinterpretations right should again involve

the moment of translation.

A comparable understanding of translation can be found in Benjamin’s specification of the

task of the translator as the work of lovingly reconstructing pure language. As is well known,

the latter term signifies a “central reciprocal relationship between languages”, a “supra-

historic” relationship between source text and target text, which makes translation possible.

To be sure, Heidegger’s notion of authenticity and Benjamin’s concept of purity are not

straightforward. Both thinkers emphasize the loss, betrayal and lack of equivalence involved

in every act of translation, so that the restored authenticity is always an illusion, a future

projection. Far from restoring autonomous meanings and authorial intentions, translation

emerges in the modern world as a way of foregrounding fragmentation and difference. It

Dionysis Kapsaskis: Translation and Film: On the Defamiliarizing Effect of Subtitles, 42-52.

New Voices in Translation Studies 4 (2008), Special Conference Issue:

‘With/out Theory: The Role of Theory in Translation Studies Research’, UCL, UK, April 2008

becomes a technique for exploring the non-linear and non-realist relationship that the self

maintains with the world. As such a technique, translation begins by questioning the very

desire for ethno-linguistic identity at the heart of European politics, and forms part of the

critique of universalism as it takes place in modernity. 1

Benjamin saw a similar potential in another typically modern endeavour, namely film. In ‘The

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, he notes the fundamental shift in

modernity from the auratic work of art – which preserves canonical connotations of self-

sufficiency, totality and uniqueness – to the fragmented cinematic sequence, with its

associations of heteronomy, plurality and mass culture. Benjamin does not explicitly compare

translation and film, but he treats both as fragmentary forms of representation which

challenge the unity and self-evidence of what they are supposed to represent. Just as

translation distorts the original text, so film distorts our perception of reality. Just as

translation shows the original’s lack of originality, so film foregrounds reality’s illusory

character. The remedial function of translation and film consists, paradoxically, in showing

how our relationship with the world remains elusive, overdetermined, present only as a future

possibility.

There is a further correspondence between film and translation as specific instantiations of

modernity. Benjamin notes that the amazing realism of film is due to the strict exclusion of all

equipment – such as cameras, lighting and recording facilities, and so on – from the cinematic

image. Absolute cinematic immediacy is achieved through an excess of mediation. As

Benjamin puts it, in film, “the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of

technology” (1992b:226). Much has been written about this insight of Benjamin’s, 2 but what

interests me here is that, by achieving such a degree of realism, film reclaims for itself the

aura that it deconstructs in classical forms of aesthetic representation.

In a similar way, translation claims immediacy by replacing the source text and dissimulating

the processes of omission, compensation, paraphrase, spatio-temporal summarization,

prioritization and so forth that lead to the target text. Translation resembles film in its capacity

to offer a carefully distorted representation of an original source. This process puts into

question the originality of the source, and both the “original” and its representation are shown

to be fragments of an absent reality – Benjamin’s forever broken vessel (1992a:79). One may

thus venture to argue that film is to classical art what translation is to classical literature.

Through similar processes of repression and reproduction, film and translation simultaneously

disguise and expose the foreign and derivative character of what we tend to perceive as

domestic and authentic.

This enigmatic play of concealing and revealing has a direct political significance. In

Translation Studies, this has been expressed in terms of two translational strategies,

foreignization and domestication. The Bible translator Franz Rosenzweig famously argued

that “to translate means to serve two masters”: the foreign writer in his foreignness and the

domestic reader in his desire to appropriate (1977:110). 3 These two strategies reflect

theoretically distinct – though practically intertwined – ways in which the experience of the

foreign has been thwarted or encouraged at an ethno-linguistic level. Translation has been

historically used to sustain or to deconstruct national mythologies of homogeneity; to reveal

or to conceal structures of power and dominance.

In his influential essay ‘The Measure of Translation Effects’, Philip E. Lewis introduced the

notion of “abusive translation” as a reaction to the strategy of repressing the discursive and

Dionysis Kapsaskis: Translation and Film: On the Defamiliarizing Effect of Subtitles, 42-52.

New Voices in Translation Studies 4 (2008), Special Conference Issue:

‘With/out Theory: The Role of Theory in Translation Studies Research’, UCL, UK, April 2008

poetic plurality of the source text, so that the translation becomes easily appropriable by a

target culture. Despite its radical undertones, the term “abuse” does not denote a desultory

translational practice, but a “controlled textual disruption” (1985:43) aspiring to counteract

conventional perceptions of the usage, usefulness and usualness of translation. As Lewis

(1985:40-41) states:

To accredit the use-values [of translation] is inevitably to opt for what domesticates or familiarizes

a message at the expense of whatever might upset or force or abuse language and thought, might

seek after the unthought or unthinkable in the unsaid or unsayable.

The “unthought” and the “unsayable” can be understood as those expressive, performative

and polyvalent aspects of a text whose rendering into another language would trouble it so

much as to occasion loss of semantic equivalence. Abusive translation would yield similar

results as Heidegger’s translations of such Greek words as adikia and al ƺ theia , mentioned

earlier. As in the case of Heidegger, lack of equivalence – as well as lack of “usefulness” and

“usualness” – directs the reader’s attention away from the quest for semantic identity, towards

textuality and the incongruous ways in which it is instantiated in different languages.

Yet another critic, Lawrence Venuti, has criticized the ideal of fluency in translation, arguing

that “by placing a premium on transparency and demanding a fluent strategy” the

conventional translating practice “can be viewed as a cultural narcissism which carries

imperialistic tendencies: it seeks an identity, a self-recognition, and finds only the same

culture in foreign writing, only the same self in the cultural other” (1991:18). The dialectic of

sameness and otherness remains suppressed under the authority of the same, for as long as

translation submits itself to the aesthetics of fluency. The effect of transparency to which

Venuti refers may be linked to Roland Barthes’s notion of the effect of the real, in that in both

cases there is the illusion of continuity and mutual belonging of reality and its representation,

of the so-called original and the so-called copy (Barthes 1982).

This critique of realism, which is equally a critique of political essentialism, was applied to

film early on. As I pointed out earlier, Benjamin refers to the “sight of immediate reality”

achieved by the cinematic image as a result of the formal characteristics of film. In ‘The Work

of Art’ essay, he doubts whether film’s innovative nature actually harbours any politically

subversive content: “So long as the movie makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other

revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary

criticism of traditional concepts of art.” While Benjamin emphasizes the cognitive potential of

film, he immediately predicts that such a potential will be overshadowed by the cinema of

spectacle and ideology: “Under these circumstances, the film industry is trying hard to spur

the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations”

(1992b:225, 226).

One need only think how effective a propaganda tool cinema has become for modern

totalitarian regimes. Most emblematically, in the hands of the Nazis absolute cinematic

realism transformed into absolute illusion. Thus, speaking to Cahiers du cinéma in 1965, Leni

Riefenstahl said of her film Triumph of the Will : “Not a single scene is staged. Everything is

genuine. And there is no tendentious commentary for the simple reason that there is no

commentary at all. It is history – pure history ” (mentioned in Sontag 1976:36, emphasis in the

original). Responding to this extreme perception of authenticity, Susan Sontag commented –

not without a hint of irony – that Riefenstahl “had told the truth”: “ Triumph of the Will

represents an already achieved and radical transformation of reality: history become theatre”

(ibid.). More than any other art, cinema effects a total translation of reality, a masterly –

Dionysis Kapsaskis: Translation and Film: On the Defamiliarizing Effect of Subtitles, 42-52.

New Voices in Translation Studies 4 (2008), Special Conference Issue:

‘With/out Theory: The Role of Theory in Translation Studies Research’, UCL, UK, April 2008

because technologically empowered – representation aiming at camouflaging linguistic and

geopolitical divides. Historically, cinema has become the total work of art and an appropriate

artefact for the total state.

It still sounds risky to suggest with Lacoue-Labarthe that the phantasmagoria of total cinema,

best exemplified by the cinema of propaganda, is “in fact the Hollywood aesthetic itself, the

‘mass soap opera’” (1990:64). But as powerful as this aesthetic is culturally, it hardly bears

scrutiny when it comes to questions of foreignness. For the process of appropriation and

naturalization of otherness in film has assumed concrete political dimensions. As Scott

MacQuire (1998:202-203) points out:

Hollywood’s notorious lack of interest in other countries and cultures as anything more than

background locations for established stars and storylines was matched only by its intolerance

toward “non-American” accents, and its indifference or outright hostility to indigenous peoples,

blacks, working-class and migrant cultures. […] The obsessive repetition of standard narrative

patterns, and the political repercussions which arose from their transgression in the occasional

“ground-breaking film” testifies to an intimate collusion between textual margins and social and

political boundaries.

Undoubtedly, any single statement on such a global and complex cultural phenomenon as

Hollywood will veer toward generalization. Moreover, Hollywood is certainly not

representative of all cinema, even as it remains the most influential model of film production.

Still, it is necessary to emphasize the link between realist narrative forms in classical

Hollywood cinema and mythologies of properness as well as perceptions of exoticism in

Hollywood and beyond. It is also possible to refer to these narrative forms in terms of the

aesthetic of transparency and fluency, that is, the very aesthetic whose imperialistic

tendencies Venuti decried in the context of translation. 4 To the extent that this aesthetic

continues to infiltrate mainstream cinema, the foreign continues to remain in an undialectical

opposition with the native. This opposition is undialectical, because it does not lead to a

synthesis whereby the social and aesthetic construction of national and linguistic identities is

recognized. In both dominant and non-dominant cultures, foreignness remains marginalized

and even contributes to the negative formation of putatively self-sufficient national and

linguistic identities.

So far I compared translation and film as two forms of representation which challenge the

unity of their respective referents (the source text; the experienced reality) and simultaneously

problematize conventional perceptions of foreignness and identity. I qualified this discussion

by referring to different normalizing strategies in cinema and in translation – such as the

primacy of fluency and semantic equivalence, domestication, Hollywood realism, and so on –

applied in order to contain the impact of the foreign element on local readerships and

audiences. I will now turn to subtitles, to consider whether they inherit from translation and

film a similarly ambivalent political dynamic.

The Defamiliarizing Effect of Subtitles

As Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour argue in their book Subtitles , “Every film is a foreign film,

foreign to some audience somewhere – and not simply in terms of language” (Balfour and

Egoyan 2004:21). Balfour and Egoyan’s attention to marginality and heteronomy is

appositely conveyed in the title of this collection of essays, interviews and artworks: Subtitles .

By exploring this privileged, if uncertain, space where film and translation meet, they

Dionysis Kapsaskis: Translation and Film: On the Defamiliarizing Effect of Subtitles, 42-52.

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