The Art of Subtitling

I watched an interesting featurette on The Criterion Channel yesterday about the history of subtitling foreign films for English-language audiences. It included some excerpts of films like Grand Illusion and Open City in their original US release prints, which illustrated how limited the early subtitle translations were compared to their latter-day restorations. The point was made that, even though far more dialogue is translated today than in the '40s, say, it is still unwieldy and counterproductive to try and translate all of the dialogue spoken in a film, because it would become overwhelming to read that many subtitles in such short order. It made me think about how much dialogue we hear in films that is not absolutely essential to conveying information that we need to know, but adds a layer of texture to the experience. As Bruce Goldstein pointed out, the subtitler's job is to capture the essence of what is being said, rather than trying to translate each and every spoken word.

I was glad to see Herman G. Weinberg mentioned in the video, as a pioneer of the subtitling process back in the '30s. It was Weinberg who was responsible for helping to bring many foreign-language classics to US audiences for the first time. I've long been interested in Weinberg's work in cinema. He was really a jack-of-all-trades, working as a music arranger for silent film scores and as a manager of the Little Theater in Baltimore, an early arthouse theater. He also made the avant garde short film, Autumn Fire, while he was living in Baltimore in 1931.