Forces from Abchazia, the other Russian-supported separatist republic, led by Sergei Bagapsh (sp?), has attacked Gergian forces in the Kodori area, says Dagens Nyheter.

The Austrian Social Democrats have elected Werner Faymann as their new leader, before new elections in September, following the collapse of the coalition government. Faymann, currently down in the polls has apparently suggested there should be a referendum before any new EU treaties. I doubt anything will come of this, but a boy can dream.

So Tbilisi was very normal as I drove around this morning. Did I notice more uniforms than usual? Maybe, but maybe that’s just me looking for them more. The tank being hauled on the back of a truck in from the outskirts of town was definitely out of the ordinary. The short convoys of black Mercedes and police cars could have been any high official about business, though on Saturday morning that’s not quite expected. Less buying of water and than you would see before a hurricane on the US Gulf Coast. And quite honestly Tbilisi during an armed conflict was more open than Washington, DC on a normal business day.

On the other hand: Mobile phone service is having sporadic outages, probably due to overload. I’ve seen some signs that banks are moving their cash to consolidated locations (rumor was that banks in Gori moved their cash out yesteday), and I had trouble drawing money this afternoon. Although I had similar trouble last weekend, too. A colleague who was here today said that the main bridge was down in Gori, and that police were not necessarily letting people drive through town. This would cut the main east-west road roughly in half.

Parliament will by all accounts declare war and martial law this afternoon. More details as they become available.

That’s Latin for “throw the dice high”, and that’s what it looks like Georgian leader Saakashvili has done.

I’m no longer the Fistful’s Man In the Caucasus — I left in March, after the violence in Armenia. Doug Merrill is now the go-to guy: he’s in Tbilisi, very close to the action. But he’s asleep right now, and it looks like some of our readers are still awake, so FWIW here’s an impression from a distance. Half-informed, amateur war analysis follows.

Who started it? — Looks like Georgia. The sniping earlier came from both sides, but the Georgians have clearly launched a major ground offensive, and that doesn’t just happen by accident.

Why? Why? — What follows is a mishmash of guesses. Take it with a big grain of salt.

South Ossetia has always been vulnerable to a blitzkrieg attack. It’s small, it’s not very populous (~70,000 people), and it’s surrounded by Georgia on three sides. It’s very rugged and mountainous, yes, but it’s not suited to defense in depth. There’s only one town of any size (Tsikhinvali, the capital) and only one decent road connecting the province with Russia.

That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.

So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains. This seems to be what the Georgians are trying to do: attack fast and hard, grab Tsikhinvali, and close the road.

So, is it working? — It’s too early to tell, but it’s not looking good.

This one is breaking fast — as I was writing an earlier version of this post, Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakashvili said at a press conference that Georgian forces had downed two Russian planes that had breached Georgian air space. Local media are reporting that Georgia has taken most of Tskhinvali, the breakaway region’s capital. The assault began last night, after a week of escalating sniping and shooting across the ceasefire lines that had been reasonably stable since the early 1990s.

One of the reports I read today (can’t find the link, grr) held that the Georgians were claiming to have headed off a “column of mercenaries” coming down from the north, i.e., Russia. This is just plausible — Russian railroad troops have been busy the last week in Georgia’s other breakaway region of Abkhazia — but also sounds like a pretext. At any rate, the Georgian leadership has decided to unfreeze the conflict by bringing it to a boil.

First reports indicate a military success for the Georgians: control of most of Tskhinvali, which seems to be the only significant prize in the region. We’re nearly 90 minutes into an announced three-hour ceasefire and “humanitarian corridor,” which seems to be about giving people time to get out of town and any wavering fighters time to change into civvies and melt into the background. After that, it’s implied, Georgian forces will be cleaning up the rest of Tskhinvali. Given the operation so far, I think they’ll succeed, and with that formally claim that South Ossetia has been reintegrated.

That’s where things get interesting, as there are several open points. First, what will Russia’s leadership do? It was willing to have Russian planes violate Georgian airspace last week during the escalation, and reports have it that one bomb each fell near the Georgian cities of Gori and Kartveli. On the other hand, this looks like a gesture — if the Russians wanted to have bombs fall on Gori and Kartveli, they jolly well would have. Escalation by the Russian side is of course possible, but Saakashvili’s government has bet that Russia won’t be all that put out about 70,000 South Ossetians. The ruble and the Russian stock market, however, both had big drops today, apparently on the theory that you never know about escalation.

Second, what will the Americans and EU do? A senior State Department figure was here in Tbilisi last week, and I would expect that the Georgian side at least hinted very broadly about what was up. He would have to deny that, of course, in the way of these things. We can assume that the Americans did not warn them off. The German foreign minister was also here, with a plan for Abkhazia. It’s slightly less likely that he was clued in, but the topic of his visit points to the next item on the reintegration agenda.

Abkhazia has always been the biggest and least tractable of Georgia’s conflicts, and the one most important to Tbilisi. Adjara went peacefully; South Ossetia is now doing things the hard way. Sooner or later, Tbilisi seems to be saying, Abkhazia will have to make its choice. Recent increased Russian activity may have led the Georgians to think that it was time to wrap up Ossetia and leave just one item on the menu.

UPDATE: Reported Russian bombardment of military airport just outside Tbilisi, details as they become available.

UPDATE 2: Wu Wei is also based in Tbilisi, and updating more regularly. Like him her, I am also getting news from Civil.ge. Internet, cell and electricity are all holding up well (all also occasionally go out during normal times), though, weirdly, I cannot access Google. Reports of Russian air power bombing two military air fields, Vaziani (just outside Tbilisi) and Marneuili, south of Tbilisi.

So when the 10 new EU members joined in 2004, the old EU-15 came up with a clunky compromise about the free movement of labor: each old member could decide for itself, but they’d have to publicly review that decision after two years (2006) and then again in three more years (2009) and then after seven years, in 2011, they’d have to drop all restrictions and let the Poles and Hungarians in. (I say 10 new members, but really this only applied to 8, because Cyprus and Malta are so tiny that nobody cared to put restrictions on them. So, this was really about the “EU-8″ — Poland and Hungary, Czechs and Slovaks, Slovenia and the three Baltic states.)

The old members came up with a bewildering array of responses, ranging from total liberalism (Britain, Ireland, Finland) to sharp restrictions (Belgium, Austria).

Then three years later, in April 2007, Romania and Bulgaria joined. The EU adopted the same two-three-seven rule for these new members as well.

The existing members — which now included the 10 new members — came up with a different bewildering array of responses. Some members that had been very liberal to the EU-8 closed their doors to the new two, while some that had been conservative reconsidered.

So we’re now at the point where you need a chart. Fortunately, our friends at the Beeb have prepared one! Here it is.

What’s interesting is that this is a snapshot, a complicated picture that’s on its way to becoming much simpler. May 2011 is less than three years away. And when all the EU-8 have complete freedom of movement, it’s unlikely that many countries will keep restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians.

But here’s a thought: will the EU keep the same rules for newer members? One might think not… after all, Croatia and Macedonia are pretty dinky. But waiting beyond them lies Turkey. So, almost certainly the seven-year rule will be implied on the new Balkan members as well, even if most members will promptly wave them in. In fact, all of these countries already have arrangements with the EU allowing some movement of labor.

(The interesting exception: Kosovo. In fact, movement of labor out of Kosovo has been getting harder, not easier. But that’s a story for another post.)

As for the effects of all this… well, that’s the big question, isn’t it. Watch this space.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn has died at age 89. Not much to add to all the obituaries, just my two kopecks’ worth that A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the most important book published between 1950 and 1975. Just when you think Solzhenitsyn is finished with his tour de force, the last sentence falls like a hammer blow.

Most of us are fortunate enough to live in countries that do not need their writers to become prophets and catalysts of change. He was not, and what he wrote helped to crack open the Soviet system. Russians will always be able to draw on his courageous example.

This coming Friday, the 8th, is the date set for the quadrennial celebration of global excellence. I refer of course to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. I’m very much looking forward to it. The video projector (Japanese) is all set up in my living room. Tiger beer (from Singapore) and Reese’s peanut butter cups (from Pennsylvania) will be consumed. I saw the footage from the rehearsal that was leaked on the internet, so I know that we can expect synchronised placard waving of a standard that will make the North Koreans look like amateurs. But we all knew that anyway, right?

The New Yorker (August 4, 2008) reports the rumour that the pianist Lang Lang will be performing on excellence night. If it were Britain (and in four years time, it will be), then we’d be getting Elton John (and maybe in four years time, we will be), so perhaps I shouldn’t make any crisp remarks. But Lang Lang? Really?

Lang Lang’s performances consist mostly of representations of the western classical piano repertoire. He also does some Chinese stuff, moulded into piano-friendly form. I heard him play in London (the Royal Festival Hall) last year. It was awful: the kind of playing you find you can’t applaud. Literally: when the recital stops, your hands do not come together. Of course, not everyone who was there that evening felt the same way: around half of the audience gave him a standing ovation. The standers and clappers were thoroughly mixed in with those who weren’t standing and weren’t clapping, and that was spectacular in itself. There were plenty of (apparently) Chinese people in the audience: were they clapping more enthusiastically than the others? It was hard to tell.

Why is Lang Lang a bad pianist? Part of the problem is the grandstanding; the sequins, the jumping up and down. Much worse is his apparent antagonism to the lyrical or textural subtlety of his material. Liszt was notorious in his youth for his showmanship, but he was not just a pianist, he was also a composer. In maturity, he produced pieces of extraordinary lightness and harmonic beauty: Les jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este, for example. Liszt’s trajectory echoes that of Beethoven: consider Beethoven’s last piano sonatas, for example. A pianist who wants to do justice to these compositions needs technique, obviously, but the crucial thing is to aim for a kind of neutrality of interpretation. This is because there are more things happening in the music than any performer can give emphasis to ‘in real time’. But Lang Lang has a strong tendency to add his programme to the programme. So you get an enormous amount of unexpected speeding up and slowing down (rubato is the term for the polite version of this behaviour). Lang Lang can do the dolcissimo but it’s usually a tease; he really wants to go for loud. But with the piano, there is a limit beyond which all your kinetic energy just gets you more harshness, not more excitement. In short, Lang Lang often bully wanks his instrument.

So now the Olympics. Is it a good fit for Lang Lang? It might be, in the same way that Tiger Woods seems to be a good fit for Accenture. Tiger Woods displays non-substantive excellence. What’s more, his achievement in this is unarguable: there’s no doubt that he often wins. However, what he wins at is a contest of smacking a small dimpled sphere a certain distance so that it goes in a marked hole and not some other place. He wins because he does this more reliably than the other guys. I don’t mean to be tendentious when I say that no matter how calm, conscientious and psychologically ‘well-sorted’ may be its participants, golf really is meaningless. Nothing is meant. That’s surely the major part of the appeal for Accenture, and the reason that it’s Tiger Woods who appears in their advertising material, not actors in experimental theatre (even though, as it happens, Accenture also sponsors experimental theatre). Tiger’s excellence is conveniently empty.

Likewise with Lang Lang. Far from writing his own lyrics (just imagine the potential for an embarrassing Bono moment) he’s not even a singer, so there are no words. Instead, Lang Lang hits a lot of notes. A lot of the time, they’re the right notes: like Tiger, Lang Lang has a statistical edge. He meets targets.

There are further comparisons that could be drawn. Tiger Woods is from a minority group in the US: that is, he’s black. Since he’s also a winner, this fact makes him sponsor-friendly. Lang Lang is from a poor background, a fact that only achieves its full potential for a sponsor of excellence when we’re told about it, as in this passage from the New Yorker article:

Winters are long, damp and cold in Beijing; at night, while Lang practiced, his father would get in his bed and warm it for him. They often slept wearing nearly all the clothes they owned. Lang Guoren [Lang Lang’s father] would wake at five and lock himself in the bathroom down the hall so that when his son woke he would not have to wait in line before washing up [washing himself] and beginning his day of practicing. … When he was ten, [Lang Lang] was accepted at the Beijing conservatory.

So we should expect to hear often of Lang Lang’s personal history. Of course, the issue is complicated by the tendency people have to write their own myths, and often well before any patron or media channel has gotten near them.

Is there anything else that might make Lang Lang the right sort of material to be making a star appearance on excellence night? Although what he does is mostly unthreatening, Lang Lang still has latitude for surprise, and that’s important. It’s a simple, visceral thing: from minute to minute, you just never know with Lang Lang. Will he be manic, crazy loud, or will he be tender, soulful? The unsubtlety that undermines his pianism gives him ‘crowd appeal’. Maybe he meets a physiological need: relief from tedium. And what kind of sponsor would be against that? It would be like being against food when there’s hungry people. Tiger doesn’t always win, it would be bo-ring if he did. And Lang Lang might do his million notes per second freak out at any moment. Did you see …? It was unbelieveable …

Like I said, I’ll be watching, so we can share our impressions later.

Shot taken from Samurai Champloo

About a year ago there was this email exchange between me and some of my AFOE colleagues in which I talked a bit about my daily job as a subtitler. Actually, I was venting. During this exchange I was invited to write a post about subtitling for AFOE.

The image at the beginning of this post is a screen shot taken from the anime series Samurai Champloo that I subtitled some time ago. The Dutch subtitle roughly translates as “So, it was really you, sitting stark naked in that bathtub?” I have translated weirder lines, though.

Many non-European nationals that settle in Europe for the first time, especially Americans, seem to find subtitling and dubbing a particularly quaint feature of the continental European landscape. It must indeed be weird to hear Will Smith speak French or German all of a sudden. And on several occasions I have heard American friends in Belgium wonder why subtitles never seem to correspond with what is actually said on screen. In general they do, really, but in a different way. Moreover, subtitles are often associated with “European” as in “arty, obscure films shown at elitist film festivals”. Last year I translated and subtitled an episode of the British soap Coronation Street in which two parents are wondering what their goth daughter must be talking about with her friends. ‘Boys, probably’ says dad. But mom replies: ‘Probably some film with subtitles that nobody else ever goes to see.’ And there I was, poor little European me, translating that line in a soap opera that could not possibly be more mainstream.

Anyway, I have hesitated a long time before deciding to finally give in and write a post about my job. AFOE is not a lifeblog and, most of all, there are some slightly unsavoury details about my job that I wanted to keep in the closet. Never mind that these details actually prompted the request to write this post… But, hey, it is August (traditional slow season at AFOE) and I feel generous. If you really want to know just how “elitist” the life of the average subtitler is, then read on.

I am not going to go too technical on you guys in this post but, noblesse oblige, I need to point out some useful resources on subtitling. Go have a look at the website of Jan Iversson, a Swedish subtitler and author of the magnificent Subtitling for the media handbook. There is also this website on subtitling standards by Fotios Karamitroglou. It gives you a good idea of all the technical issues. And if you are really masochistic you can go and read some excerpts of Pilar Orero’s Topics in audiovisual translation.

And how does all this technical stuff translate into practice? In November 2007 the European Parliament and Council adopted Media 2007 the latest EU programme designed to support the European audiovisual sector. I had a closer look and discovered the EU had commissioned a few interesting studies. One of these studies (pdf), by French Media Consulting Group, deals with ‘dubbing and subtitling practices in the European audiovisual sector’. It is an extensive overview of how different European countries deal with foreign audiovisual material:

As regards works distributed in cinemas: most European countries use subtitling. And even though some countries would traditionally be inclined to prefer dubbing (Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic), It was noted that most of them are clearly moving towards subtitling. In fact, only Italy and Spain, where films are generally dubbed, have resisted this trend.

As regards works broadcast on television: dubbing is the preferred option in 10 countries: Germany, Austria, Spain, France, Hungary, Italy, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Switzerland, and French-speaking Belgium. Voiceover is used in 4 countries: Bulgaria, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. Voiceover is also present to a lesser extent in Estonia, where 33% of foreign language programs use voiceover, with the remainder subtitled.

The remaining European countries use subtitling, with Luxembourg and Malta a special case in that they broadcast foreign audiovisual works exclusively in the original version.

The study also mentions, among many other things, the size of the European dubbing and subtitling market:

The study estimated that 2006 turnover for the European dubbing and subtitling industries was between 372 million € (minimum estimate) and 465 million € (maximum estimate).

And here is a nice confirmation of what everybody in Europe already knows (emphasis mine):

Non-European fictions accounted for 73% of the total, of which 73.15% consisted in American programs (54% of the overall total). Non-European fictions represented 68.57% of hours in dubbing countries, compared with 79.55% in subtitling countries, which in fact corresponds to a clear predominance of English-speaking programs since most (i.e., 57%) of these works are coming from English-speaking countries (USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada).

Okay, so much for the practical information. I now need to explain one more thing before I can go on to rant a bit about my personal experiences.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this post many people, and not just my American friends, wonder about the discrepancy between what they hear on screen and what they read in the subtitles. The explanation is really quite simple.

First of all, people process spoken information faster than written information. Subtitles follow the pace of spoken language. The amount of text used in subtitles therefore needs to be reduced so that the reading speed matches the speed of the dialogue. The faster a character speaks, the more the translator needs to reduce his text. Most of the time it is simply impossible to do a word for word translation. You, the people who watch tv and movies, simply cannot read fast enough. It is your fault, not the subtitler’s. The need to respect the viewers’ reading speed is a constantly recurring and major challenge in subtitling.

Moreover, in most cases, notably television, subtitlers will translate for a very broad audience. Sure, there are people who can read really fast, but we also have to take into account that there are many people who cannot. The elderly, the less educated, children, etcetera. The reading speed is therefore set to accommodate the average viewer. Of course, it all depends on the targeted audience. If you are doing specialized translations for, say, corporate managers or academic graduates the reading speed will be faster than if you are translating strictly for young children. Personally, I translate mainly for a television audience. Now get this. According to a Belgian study years ago the average television viewer’s literacy level was estimated, if I remember correctly, to be that of a… fourteen year old!

Secondly, subtitlers translate for people who do not understand the source language or the cultural context of that source language. For instance, the English expression “it is raining cats and dogs” simply does not make any sense when translated literally. Dutch-language viewers, my target audience, will not think of heavy rainfall. They will literally be seeing mental images of cats and dogs falling out of the sky. A good translator then needs to come up with the equivalent of that expression in his own language, which will more than likely not feature cats and dogs, and quietly explain to some people (like I had to do) that yes, the English voice was mentioning cats and dogs and that no, this does not mean I have to mention these domestic creatures in my translation. Another example is the American Medicaid program. Unless you are translating a documentary explaining what Medicaid is, you’ll need to find an equivalent, very often a descriptive translation, that makes sense to people who have no idea what it is.

Let’s go back to the cats and dogs for a second. Once I had to do a whole series of funny American cartoons for kids. In one episode the expression “it is raining like cats and dogs” was used in combination with an image of actual cartoon cats and dogs falling out of the sky that totally belied my earlier argument that I do not have to mention these creatures in my translation. After all, this time the animals were shown on screen. So what does a good translator do in a case like this?

Well, first of all you cry a little and curse the fact that you chose to become a subtitler. Next, you search your native language database for any expressions dealing with heavy rainfall in the hope that at least one of them will mention either a dog or a cat so that your translation will correspond with what is being shown on screen. In Dutch there is the word hondenweer or dog’s weather, which means “really bad weather” and generally describes heavy rainfall combined with heavy winds. I solved the pun problem by feeding cats into the equation and came up with something like: “Today, it is dog’s AND cat’s weather.” The pun was preserved and the text corresponded with the image. Eureka!

Sadly, more often than not subtitlers are not that lucky. Just consider this movie scene I once had with a bitchy female character brushing off a vampire with the words “bite me”… And no, a literal translation is not an option in Dutch because you would lose the pun.

The frustrating fact that, in subtitling, the audience can easily compare the source language with the translation is something you learn to accept pretty soon in your career. No matter how ingenious your solutions to translation problems are, there will always be criticism from individuals who are either totally obnoxious or who are completely unaware of what a good translation is all about. And I am working for television. Thousands of people, sometimes even hundreds of thousands, get to see and, in theory, judge my work.

Another closely related frustrating fact is that people are not even supposed to judge your work. A good translation is one that viewers remain totally oblivious to. As soon as viewers start noticing your translation there is something wrong with it. Subtitlers are trained in several techniques that allow the viewer to read subtitles without paying too much attention to them. We respect the rhythm of the dialogue, we keep the layout of the subtitles and the sentence structure (avoid sub clauses, for instance) as clear and simple as possible, etcetera. Sometimes you will have to alter a good translation simply because it will be too difficult to read. Also, the lettertype or font of the subtitles is specifically designed to provide maximum reading comfort. And here we touch upon another constraint for subtitlers. Your text must fit the screen. Sometimes, especially if you are working with a large font size, you simply have to drop information because otherwise your text would be too long and scroll off screen. On several occasions I have had to alter a perfectly good translation just because there was not enough room at the end of the line for the full stop.

The technical constraints are a source of constant frustration. This frustration, or challenge, is particularly palpable when you are translating a quality program. One time I spent two weeks on a screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Now there is a challenge for you. You cannot translate everything, you cannot keep the original sentence structure and you cannot always keep the rhyme schemes. Furthermore, viewers need to follow the action on screen as much as they need to follow the dialogue, which means you have to “simplify” the dialogue and cut it into easily digestible little chunks of text. And, remember, they only have a limited time in which to read the subtitles. If the text is too difficult or too long they cannot go back and read it a second time. At the same time the translator must convey as much of the original flavour, both stylistically and contextually, as possible. With films like these I often feel like I am some sort of firefighter trying to salvage as much as I can from an immense burning mansion. You take out the expensive furniture and artwork and all the people and you leave behind the wallpaper, the rugs, the goldfish tank and the occasional poodle. Sorry, folks, no time.

The funny thing is that many people will claim they never read the subtitles and that they do not need them. This is actually a compliment. Little do they know that those dastardly subtitlers actually trick them into believing that. Research measuring the eye movements of people watching subtitled movies has demonstrated that everybody reads the subtitles, consciously or not. In countries with a long established subtitling tradition viewers are simply so used to reading subtitles that they hardly notice them anymore.

So, to summarize, subtitlers do everything in their power to make sure people do not notice all their brilliant solutions to difficult problems. And they do this so well, that more often than not even their customers (the television stations that buy the subtitles, for instance) have no clue either. They tend to have no idea of the true value of the product they are buying and adjust their prices accordingly. Downwards, ever downwards. To quote from the Media 2007 study mentioned upstream (emphasis mine):

The quality of audiovisual translation will be a major issue in the evolution of subtitling and dubbing in Europe. The quality of audiovisual translation (time spent on research, time spent on contextual analysis, verification) is being threatened by pressure on the structural variables of the market: price, volume, deadlines. The problems of quality of the audiovisual translation are not always caused by an insufficiency of existing training courses.

No, the quality is often market driven. Truly talented translators are driven out of the market because too many television execs have little regard for them. Demand for their quality is low and prices are constantly being driven down. Even experienced translators, indeed under pressure of prices, volumes and deadlines, are having to compromise in order to make ends meet. Or they leave the business altogether. The gaps are then filled by lesser subtitling gods who take advantage of the lower standards and give creedence to the often heard complaint that the quality of subtitles is really bad.

Fortunately, there are still plenty of good translators out there who keep on trucking. Why? Because it is a fascinating and highly varied job. You get to do everything from documentaries to soaps to movies to cartoons to… the list is endless. Nowadays most translators work at home and thanks to the internet you can work in any country you want. All you need is an ADSL connection to download your work and a pc equipped with the necessary software and you are good to go. I am now living in France while I am working for a translation company in Belgium, but I could as easily decide to move to Canada.

Oh, one more thing. About those “unsavoury details”. If there is one thing I absolutely hate to translate, it is… porn. Yes, porn needs to be subtitled as well, believe it or not. I haven’t had any porn to translate for two years now, but in the past I used to do some work for Belgian pay tv. Porn was part of the package, either you accepted the whole package, including great movies and awesome documentaries, or they took their business elsewhere (which they eventually did anyway in order to cut prices, but that is another story).

Porn sucks, no pun intended, for several reasons. The first reason is the appeal of porn. People often ask me what kind of stuff I translate. Typically, I’ll then cite a list of movies and documentaries and make sure to proudly mention that I have done notoriously difficult things like Shakespeare and comedy. The British bard and comedy, however, do not generally impress people much. When I mention Japanese anime the reactions get a little better, “way cool” and all that, but not much. By now you must know that subtitlers have a frustrating job with little or no gratification and that it is always nice for us if we can extract at least a glimmer of recognition out of somebody. So, inevitably, I will be forced to bring up the subject of porn. Remember the enthusiasm with which Obama was recently welcomed in Berlin? That is exactly the reaction I tend to get when I mention porn. All of a sudden I am the toast of the party. How humiliating is that?

The second reason why porn sucks is its unpredictability. Yes, porn can be unpredictable. At least for subtitlers. I have been in the subtitling business for almost eighteen years now and I never missed a deadline. Apart from this one time when, at the very beginning of my porn career, I accepted to do a porn movie over the weekend. On Friday night I got a call from my client. Would I be willing to quickly do an X-rated flick by next Monday? Sure, why not. How much work could that possibly be? Famous last words.

A typical normal feature film, one and a half hours long and with few action sequences, will have some 700-800 subtitles. About three days work if it is not too difficult. This particular porn flick went up to 700!! Even when, obviously, there was plenty of action.

To make things worse, the damn thing was difficult too. Yes, porn can even be difficult. As most of you will know (I assume cheekily) porn producers for some reason must insist on telling a story. In this case the story was about some bimbo trying to make it through college. She was doing a major in Spanish or in history. At one point she was attending class, you could tell because she was wearing glasses, and flaunting her knowledge about the early history of California. She was supposed to be a good student too. I forgot what it was and I’ll be damned if I go and check my archives but suddenly, and to my great horror, she mentioned a 15th century Spanish book. And she gave the title in Spanish. Get the picture? This American bimbo had probably never spoken a word of Spanish in her life before. Hell, she even lacked basic English speaking skills. That mouth was definitely not made for talking. I have a major in Spanish and I did not understand a word of it.

I was so upset that I made it a point of honour to find that book. And I did. After several hours trawling the internet I found exactly ONE webpage that mentioned the book and its Spanish title. That one subtitle alone, invoice value seventy eurocents, cost me hours of work and precious time. And, at the same time, I realized that absolutely no-one watching this flick would give a damn about this Spanish book. That is another thing about porn. Your work means absolutely nothing to no-one. Or almost no-one. There are actually viewers who insist on porn to be subtitled. The pay tv channel at one point tried to broadcast some flicks without subtitles and apparently received so many complaints that they were forced to reinstate them.

The Spanish book was not exceptional, by the way. In another movie a scholarly-like porn actress (she too was wearing glasses to make her character credible) was reading from a marine biology book and citing various names of deep sea mollusks.

And there is the quality of the sound. Porn is often made on the cheap, anyway, with a handycam and not much else in the way of sound equipment. You know how paper always seems to make so much more noise in movies than it does in real life? Well, hard plastic is even worse than paper. Imagine the following scene. A couple is talking and making love in the middle of a room, far away from the camera and mike, on a mattress covered with hard plastic. Outside the building you hear cars going by and dogs barking. In the background movie assistants are knocking things over and there is the sound of the director giving directions. The dialogue of the couple banging away on the noisy mattress is garbled. Some sentences come through clearly and others do not. You, as a subtitler, have to turn all this mess into a consistent dialogue.

But it can get worse. Shower room full of girls, the showers are on and all the girls are giggling and talking among themselves. The main lead actress is standing off-screen, far away under one of the showers amid the noisy girls. On screen you see the male lead having a conversation with the female lead. This dialogue, in the beginning of the movie, sets up “the story”. It is therefore important to get all the information right. You, the subtitler, however, can only hear the male lead… Etcetera, etcetera.

I could go on and on, but I’ll leave it at this. I have done my duty and talked about subtitling. Would love to hear more in the comments section from any colleagues out there, though. Do not be shy.

PS: Here is another good and concise page on subtitling. By Mary Carroll.

Update: Welcome, readers of Andrew Sullivan and The Plank (and Metafilter!). I needed to be a little more precise when I stated that “people process spoken language faster than written language.” This is true in subtitling, not necessarily in other areas, because the viewers are following both the action on screen and the text.

Here’s another little USA extradition headache for an eastern European country, but unlike the Serbian case where it’s a bar fight that turned out very badly, this one is a tiny little slice of the global nature of the current financial crisis.  At issue is the whereabouts of Bulgarian-born Julian Tzolov, whom federal prosecutors would very much like to talk to about his career as a broker at Credit Suisse selling auction rate securities (asset-backed bonds with frequent yield resets) to now aggrieved clients.  The clients apparently thought they were buying bonds backed by student loans but were in fact buying dodgy mortgages, an impression due it seems to the wheeze of adding the description “student loan” to whatever the asset actually was. 

Whatever the outcome, Tzolov provides a good example of why America can seem like an appealing place: he went from arriving in the US in the early 1990s with not much more than high school graduation to his name, to getting a degree in finance (with a bankruptcy in there somewhere), to jetting to Israel to sell these securities to corporate investors.  He even managed what sounds like a trade-up to Morgan Stanley before the feds started sniffing around and his apartment emptied out.   Anyway, the point is that the US may have been the playground of the financial shenanigans, but everyone was getting involved. 

Amazingly, there is a US-Bulgaria extradition treaty all the way back to 1924, and the US Senate is supposed to ratify a new one very soon.  So there will likely be more about the case in the months ahead.