Kinema Club Subtitling Consortium

[Lang Thompson]

Actually you could even do a rough voice-over translation for sound films
like newscasts often do, though it would be so inelegant and distracting
that it probably wouldn't be worth the trouble.  The Iranians came up with
an unusual solution to early sound films (which were nearly all imported)
when dubbing was almost impossible and subtitling impractical:  Every five
minutes or so they would insert written intertitles that explained the
recent story developments.  The few literate audience members would read
them aloud for the rest.  The problems they ran into were that this
increased the length of the movie (so that if it went beyond two hours,
actual scenes got cut) and that it was all too easy for the projectionist
to splice the intertitles in the wrong place which must have been a surreal
or Ed Woodian experience.  LT


>We can learn a cheap, easy form of translation from silent era Japanese
>filmmakers. Rather than going to the expense of subtitles for foreign
>films, the benshi performed a running translation of foreign films. This
>could be an option for silent films. An English benshi performance could
>easily be dubbed onto a tape's soundtrack, even with many consumer level
>VCRs. 

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Lang Thompson
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/wlt4

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