AMERICAN IDIOM TOUGH ON MOVIE TRANSLATORS
AMERICAN IDIOM TOUGH ON MOVIE TRANSLATORS
St. Louis Post-Dispatch; 4/25/1996; Laurie Goering; Chicago Tribune
St. Louis Post-Dispatch04-25-1996
FERNANDO NAUFEL's subtitling coup came on a little-known comedy called "Up the Creek."In the key scene in the 1984 movie, a dog tries to warn some whitewater rafters that one of their buddies has disappeared. But where is the missing man? The dog mimes the answer - down river - using a down vest and a hunk of liver."I remember thinking, `What do I do with that?"' says Naufel, 32, who for 10 years has been translating U.S. films into Portuguese for Brazilian audiences. "You can't do it literally. You can't add footnotes."His solution was inspired. Figado, Portuguese for liver, doesn't rhyme with river, but baco, the Portuguese term for spleen, does sound a lot like baixo, or down. So the hunk of liver became a spleen in the subtitles.
And what about river? "I just don't remember," Naufel confesses. "But somehow we made it work."
Such are the trials of Brazil's movie translators who are faced daily with the challenge of turning Wayne and Garth, Ace Ventura and other Hollywood oddities into something this movie-mad nation can follow and enjoy.In Brazil, a sprawling nation of 158 million, more people own televisions than refrigerators, and even the poorest urban slums and remotest rural huts sport satellite dishes. So translating movies for screen, TV and home video is big business.At Herbert Richers S.A., one of Brazil's largest movie subtitling and dubbing operations, 100 full-time employees and 150 part-timers subtitle 120 movies a year and dub 300 for the national television and home video market.In most cases, they have about three days to work out subtitles for each feature-length film. It can be a daunting task.Older films sometimes show up in the company's Rio studios without accompanying scripts. In the case of "Gone With the Wind," translators spent days trying to figure out what Prissy, the slave girl, was saying when she blurts, "I ain't never birthed no babies!""That one was the worst," remembers Danielle Soares, the head of Richers' scripting room, where workers huddle over tape machines matching translations to film, second by second. "All those slave expressions. We had to say them all out loud a lot before we understood."
Translating U.S. culture is even harder. How do you explain a tense football moment to viewers who have never heard of "fourth and long?" Or "Wayne's World" to viewers without basement family rooms or local cable access stations?"It happens every day that there's something just impossible to translate," says Paulo Israel, head of operations for the studio. "We just do our best."Among the toughest rules, translators say, is that the dialogue must fit on the screen and stay there at least one second. In 90 percent of films, at least some of the language must be cut.In the case of Woody Allen films, the cuts are deep. "Everybody's neurotic and they're all talking all the time and you've just got to cut down a lot on what they say," Naufel said.Even simpler films are rarely translated word for word. "The roots aren't the same, in language or in culture," Israel said. "You can't change the themes or feelings of the story but it's just impossible to translate word for word."In Portuguese, for example, "it's raining cats and dogs" just doesn't make sense. Neither does most American foul language, nearly universally translated into Portuguese as "Droga!" or roughly, "Darn!" Eddie Murphy's mother would be proud.Israel remembers the time "headlines" got translated as just that - "lineas de cabeca," or "lines of the head." And "warden" somehow in Portuguese is always taken as a proper name, with the prisoners addressing Mr. "Warden" in the subtitles instead of the "guarda."But nothing matches the error foisted on a forlorn actor whose plea, "I'm afraid of dying penniless!" somehow made it into Portuguese as a fear of dying "sem penis.""That wasn't one of ours," emphasizes Gil Monteaux, the commercial head of Richers. "But it certainly was memorable."But for every translating foible there also are sterling successes. The characters in "Dumb and Dumber," the Jim Carrey film starring a pair of idiots, were in Brazil renamed Deb and Loide. The new Portuguese title? "Debiloide," or Retarded.Studio executives disagree on which type of movies are easiest to translate. Action movies like "Assassins," now being processed at Richers, have little dialogue but a lot of slang. Romances, on the other hand, such as "The Bridges of Madison County," rarely have slang but are chock full of dialogue.So which are easiest? "Charlie Chaplin movies," Monteaux jokes.
{PICTURE FIELD} 1995 Photo FILED: Motion Picts.,-Films,-"Dumb & Dummber" jsb
Copyright © 1996, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch; 4/25/1996; Laurie Goering; Chicago Tribune
St. Louis Post-Dispatch04-25-1996
FERNANDO NAUFEL's subtitling coup came on a little-known comedy called "Up the Creek."In the key scene in the 1984 movie, a dog tries to warn some whitewater rafters that one of their buddies has disappeared. But where is the missing man? The dog mimes the answer - down river - using a down vest and a hunk of liver."I remember thinking, `What do I do with that?"' says Naufel, 32, who for 10 years has been translating U.S. films into Portuguese for Brazilian audiences. "You can't do it literally. You can't add footnotes."His solution was inspired. Figado, Portuguese for liver, doesn't rhyme with river, but baco, the Portuguese term for spleen, does sound a lot like baixo, or down. So the hunk of liver became a spleen in the subtitles.
And what about river? "I just don't remember," Naufel confesses. "But somehow we made it work."
Such are the trials of Brazil's movie translators who are faced daily with the challenge of turning Wayne and Garth, Ace Ventura and other Hollywood oddities into something this movie-mad nation can follow and enjoy.In Brazil, a sprawling nation of 158 million, more people own televisions than refrigerators, and even the poorest urban slums and remotest rural huts sport satellite dishes. So translating movies for screen, TV and home video is big business.At Herbert Richers S.A., one of Brazil's largest movie subtitling and dubbing operations, 100 full-time employees and 150 part-timers subtitle 120 movies a year and dub 300 for the national television and home video market.In most cases, they have about three days to work out subtitles for each feature-length film. It can be a daunting task.Older films sometimes show up in the company's Rio studios without accompanying scripts. In the case of "Gone With the Wind," translators spent days trying to figure out what Prissy, the slave girl, was saying when she blurts, "I ain't never birthed no babies!""That one was the worst," remembers Danielle Soares, the head of Richers' scripting room, where workers huddle over tape machines matching translations to film, second by second. "All those slave expressions. We had to say them all out loud a lot before we understood."
Translating U.S. culture is even harder. How do you explain a tense football moment to viewers who have never heard of "fourth and long?" Or "Wayne's World" to viewers without basement family rooms or local cable access stations?"It happens every day that there's something just impossible to translate," says Paulo Israel, head of operations for the studio. "We just do our best."Among the toughest rules, translators say, is that the dialogue must fit on the screen and stay there at least one second. In 90 percent of films, at least some of the language must be cut.In the case of Woody Allen films, the cuts are deep. "Everybody's neurotic and they're all talking all the time and you've just got to cut down a lot on what they say," Naufel said.Even simpler films are rarely translated word for word. "The roots aren't the same, in language or in culture," Israel said. "You can't change the themes or feelings of the story but it's just impossible to translate word for word."In Portuguese, for example, "it's raining cats and dogs" just doesn't make sense. Neither does most American foul language, nearly universally translated into Portuguese as "Droga!" or roughly, "Darn!" Eddie Murphy's mother would be proud.Israel remembers the time "headlines" got translated as just that - "lineas de cabeca," or "lines of the head." And "warden" somehow in Portuguese is always taken as a proper name, with the prisoners addressing Mr. "Warden" in the subtitles instead of the "guarda."But nothing matches the error foisted on a forlorn actor whose plea, "I'm afraid of dying penniless!" somehow made it into Portuguese as a fear of dying "sem penis.""That wasn't one of ours," emphasizes Gil Monteaux, the commercial head of Richers. "But it certainly was memorable."But for every translating foible there also are sterling successes. The characters in "Dumb and Dumber," the Jim Carrey film starring a pair of idiots, were in Brazil renamed Deb and Loide. The new Portuguese title? "Debiloide," or Retarded.Studio executives disagree on which type of movies are easiest to translate. Action movies like "Assassins," now being processed at Richers, have little dialogue but a lot of slang. Romances, on the other hand, such as "The Bridges of Madison County," rarely have slang but are chock full of dialogue.So which are easiest? "Charlie Chaplin movies," Monteaux jokes.
{PICTURE FIELD} 1995 Photo FILED: Motion Picts.,-Films,-"Dumb & Dummber" jsb
Copyright © 1996, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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