Lost in translation

Poster from our cinema's website

Next week the 5th Chinon film festival opens at the Cinéma Rabelais. It's a terrific cinema. The combined upstairs and downstairs probably seats about 400. One film screen. Thursdays the film club Cinéplus puts on art-house films. The rest of the week it's general up-to-the-moment programming. It's a good arrangement. The first time we went to the festival it was showing German films - with French subtitles fortunately as neither of us has German.  Fabulous collection of films. We missed the next two as we were in the UK. This year however, we're here and will be seeing an all-American film festival (with French sub-titles) running for six days. There are fourteen screenings including contemporary gems by Jeff Nichols and classics such as Night of the Hunter/Robert Mitchum (1956) and To Kill A Mockingbird/Gregory Peck (1962). Someone has a good nose for programming.

These days we watch French TV regularly and go to the cinema pretty much every week. However to begin with, both presented a bit of a challenge.  We deliberately chose just French television as a way of keeping ourselves up to date with current affairs etc, culture, and of course the language. What we found helpful was watching programmes - documentaries, dramas, news, detective series - with subtitles in French for the hard of hearing. The dialogue that we just couldn't catch because it was either too fast or there was too much slang, we could now see, and make a note of it. This changed everything. Then we started watching films on television which were usually  dubbed rather than subtitled. Another language learning curve.

The moment came when we thought we could manage well enough to go to the Cinéma Rabelais for a Harry Potter film. At the time it was showing the second in the H.P. series: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets/Harry Potter et la chambre des secrets. We'd read the book in English, seen the film in English, so knew the story. The night before on TV we caught the first film - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone/Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers. It was just as well we did. First of all we had a chance to get used to the accents and different pronunciation of names. But more importantly Hogwarts had become 'Poudlard' and Severus Snape had become 'Severus Rogue'.  Why? Don't really know. That's how it was. But it's the sort of thing that can knock you off track because you're not sure what you've heard or if you've misheard or missed a detail. So you're scrabbling to keep up. We went to the cinema the next night. No problem, and we've now seen all the Harry Potter films over here in French, which we're happy about as we've always managed to miss them in the UK.

Translation carries such a huge responsibility in trying to capture all those unique elements that distinguish an author's writing style and then placing them in another language. Years ago I was lucky enough to meet Barbara Bray briefly in Paris. I was working in France at the time and had gone to meet her regarding a theatre project. Critic, script editor, partner to Samuel Beckett, supporter of Harold Pinter,  she was also the principle translator of the work of Marguerite Duras - one of my favourite authors - into English. Her obituary in The Guardian March 2010, is an amazing read. Her identical twin sister Olive is also a translator.

From our visits to the cinema it's the dialogue of humour that seems to be the trickiest to translate. When Woody Allen films are shown here they always have French subtitles. So far we've seen Midnight in Paris, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Whatever Works and Vicky Christina Barcelona. With each of these films, the French sub-titles have been translated so loosely and simplistically, missing all sorts of detail, nuance and even on occasion are inaccurate. We've often come out wondering what a non-English speaking audience could possibly have got from the film. 

Translation is an extraordinary skill and it's now very much part of our daily life.