A Case Study Of The Films The Intouchables And Amélie And Their Translation In American English

The popularity of the movie industry has increased during the last century. According to IMDb, since the early 1920s, there has been an average of 2500 films produced each year around the world. This number has doubled in the past 10 years. Indeed, there was a boom and the growth that followed never slowed down, going from 4584 movie productions made worldwide in 2005 to 9387 in 2015. The leading country in the movie industry is India, and its well-known Bollywood with around 1000 productions every year. The third country is the USA, with an average of 500 movies produced every year. France is the European leader with 300 films produced in 2015.

However, movies are shot in one specific language which is problematic for people living in other parts of the world, where a different language is spoken. Therefore, they have to be translated to be exported worldwide. A film, as a text, “needs translation to travel”. Different options are possible: dubbing or subtitling. When this has been settled, a second choice has to be made: domestication or foreignization. In this paper, I will focus on the exportation of two French movies to the American market, The Intouchables (2011) and Amélie (2001). I will show what options have been chosen by the translator and what are their limits and advantages.

Translation exists since many centuries, but it has been denied and disowned for a long time. A lot of people perceive translation as reproduction or a pale copy of the original source. However, it is almost never possible for the target text (TT) to be identical to the source text (ST). It is an illusion that Nida has proved wrong in 1964 with his principle of correspondence. If translation was seen from a negative point of view for many centuries, it has however gained a new status in the last 30 years. Indeed, “translation studies has clearly experienced ‘turns’ over the past decades”. The world has faced many changes and globalization has made the demand for translation grow. As Cronin claims, translation has been brought “into the heart of the globalizing process from 1980s onwards.” Therefore, new kinds of translations have appeared. It is, among others, the case of audio-visual translation. The film industry appeared in the late 19th century when the Lumière brothers presented a projected moving picture to an audience in Paris for the first time. Since then, this industry has evolved, developed and grown and the needs for translators to work on those movies has itself expand. At first, movies were short and had no dialogue, thus translation was not needed. The Jazz Singer (1927, USA) was the first ever movie to incorporate synchronized dialogue (Science and Media Museum website, 2011). With this huge progress came the need to translate movies so they could be introduced to other markets.

As mentioned earlier, different options are available to the translator when it comes to movie translation: subtitling or dubbing. In other words, dubbing is when dialogues and narration of the source language (SL) are replaced into the language of the viewing audience, also known as the target language (TL). The strongest constraint is probably the lip synchronization. Indeed, the new script has to match with the actors’ expressions and lip movements. The first dubbed movies appeared in the early 1930s. This option is still very often chosen by countries like France and is however criticized throughout the world. Subtitling, on the other hand, does not erase anything from the original source. On the contrary, every sound and words are kept as subtitling is a written translation of the dialogue. Subtitling presents the translated and source languages simultaneously, but it transforms speech into writing without altering the source soundtrack. However, it is important to notice the difference between subtitling and captioning. In fact, those 2 techniques, even if they share similarities (written dialogues), are different. As a matter of fact, captioning is the transcription of a speech and important sound effects for the benefit of deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and others, and therefore does not include any form of translation.

So which approach is the best when it comes to “translate” or adapt a French movie to the American audience? In the case of the French movie Amélie, produced in 2001, the choice has been made to use subtitles instead of dubbing. It is also the case of the other movie I have decided to focus on in this paper, The Intouchables (2011). The question is why American distributors have made that choice? First of all, it is a question of money. As Dries puts it, the decision 'is often influenced less by preference than by custom and financial considerations'. The second claim is linked to the improvement of the language skills of the viewers. Film watchers can hear the dialogue verbally and read the written words on the screen in their native language, their competence in language will, therefore, be improved. But translating films is a tough task. Even conversations must satisfy the target language's idioms. Subtitles should be conforming limitations of space and time. It is what is considered as the biggest issue of subtitling. In The Intouchables, the character of Driss speaks quite fast sometimes and therefore, the subtitles cannot convey the same emotion as the initial talk. Indeed, there are rules that must be followed by the translator: subtitles can only be 64 characters long, or no more than two lines and must be on screen for only 6 seconds (United Language Group website). It is thus inevitable that fragment or intention of the original text will be missing. This disadvantage has also been encountered in Amélie, and the translator has decided to let some of the conversations aside as if it did not actually exist. It is the major disadvantage of subtitles. The question is what part of the ST should be translated in the TT, and what part should/can be omitted, without altering the message.

As we have seen with the two movies analysed here, Americans are keen on subtitling foreign films. But what are the limits of this option? When the decision has been made to subtitle a movie instead of dub it, the translator is presented 2 options: domestication or foreignization. The first term means that the translator makes the translation ‘sound’ as close as possible to the target language. The target audience is expected to make no, or little effort in trying to interpret and decode the translated discussion. Thus, the translation is brought to the spectator, using references and expressions he/she will recognize as he/she usually uses them daily in real life. But this implies that the translator must make several changes for the message to fit with the target viewers. The latter term, foreignization, is the opposite. Indeed, this strategy refers to the preserving the original cultural context. Venuti argues that when it comes domestication, the translator 'leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him', while, in the case of foreignization, the translator 'leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him'.

In Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s movies, translators have made some important decisions concerning domestication in terms of settings, names, measurement units, date format and cultural references. In The Intouchables, there are a lot of allusions to the French social system which has no equivalent in America. When the characters mention the APL (Allocation Personnalisée au Logement), the translator has decided to translate it by ‘housing grants’. Even if the idea behind it is quite close, the rules and regulations behind it are however different. It is the same for the ASSEDIC (known today in France as Pôle Emploi), which has simply been translated by ‘benefits’. Even if it is the closest variant across the Atlantic, it is not the same thing and the notions brought by it are not equal. Another domestication procedure has struck me while I was watching those two movies: measurement units and date format. In Amélie, there are a lot of time references. From dates to hours, translators had to adapt the French system for the American viewers to understand it without thinking about it. Therefore, within the first minute of the movie, ‘18h23’ became ‘6:23 pm' and ‘le 3 septembre 1973’ was translated by ‘September 3rd 1973’. Domestication also happened to the metric system, and ‘9 kilomètres’ turn out to be ‘5 miles’. Culture references are very often easy to translate through the domestication process. In The Intouchables, Patrick Juvet, a 1980s singer, is compared to Blondie, Mesrine, the most famous criminal is referred to Al Capone and Dave (another singer often mocked because of his haircut) to Justin Bieber. In addition, French traditions do not always have a counterpart in other countries. It is, for example, the case of the ‘galette des rois’ mentioned in The Intouchables. Translators have decided to use the Halloween holiday to translate it. This decision is quite interesting as the notions behind it are different (one referring to the Christian religion, the other to a Celtic event). However, the translator focused on the fact that the ‘galette' is something French people eat as a treat once a year and has decided to focus on Halloween, a tradition that also happens once a year and where kids dress-up to get candies.

Semiotic levels are also part of the film communication and they go beyond linguistic. Verbal codes are quite difficult to “translate” from French to English for example. French people use the personal pronouns ‘vous’ and ‘tu’ for different occasion and they belong to a different register of speech. This notion is lost in translation when it comes to the English language as there is only the pronoun ‘you’ that can be used for both. Therefore, when you hear Driss says ‘tu’ to the police officer at the beginning of the movie and a few seconds later ‘vous’ to Phillippe, the formal intention of the director of the movie is cut short as the notion of respect and disrespect shown by the protagonist has no counterpart.

However, the domestication is not total in those two movies. Indeed, if so, the translator would have also changed the currency. In Amélie, the SF (Source Film) and the TT (Target Film) mention both ‘francs’ and ‘euros’ for The Intouchables, instead of American dollars. The idea of domestication is also really interesting when it comes to famous events or places. ‘Montmartre’, ‘Le Sacré Coeur’, and the ‘Tour de France’ are known worldwide. Thus, the translator has not replaced them with other notions. It would be weird to see cyclists on the screen while the translation mentions, for example, the SuperBowl, or see the Sacré Coeur and ‘read’ about the White House. This process is called ‘preservation’ and it is the “most foreignizing translation strategy in the continuum”.

To conclude, there is no ‘good option’ when it comes to film translation. It is essential to weigh the positives and negatives aspects of each method. Some countries, such as France, Spain and Germany usually opt for dubbing 'in order to strengthen linguistic or political unity” and to preserve 'the purity of a language if it had already fulfilled a linguistic and political unifying role'. In other countries, such as the USA, “subtitling is the standard procedure for translating films in the English-speaking world”. Regarding the choice of domestication or foreignization, the choice has to be made in regards to the aim of the film. If the goal of the movie is to introduce a specific culture to the world, then foreignization would be the best option. However, domestication is the main strategy in film translation as it provides the audience to instantly understand the message. Therefore, cultural, political, and ideological aspects should be kept in mind in order to best echo the message of the SF in the TF.

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