It translates into sweat

Tim Sexton had his hands full. The Santa Monica-based translator had been asked to write subtitles for Alfonso Cuaron’s “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” a sexually explicit tale about two Mexican teens, full of nonstop slang and profanity delivered at breakneck speed. Living in Mexico City for four years helped. So did consulting with Cuaron’s son, a student at Vassar College, who filled him in on teenage verbiage for marijuana (“Buddha”) and a good-looking woman (“total babe”). But no matter how much research he did, the task-at-hand loomed large.

“Profanity was the big debate,” recalls the screenwriter (HBO’s “For Love or Country”), who also translated the critically acclaimed and almost equally profane “Amores Perros.” The challenge, as Sexton recalls: “How to present these characters not as delinquents from a boys’ home but, joyfully, as relatively normal, slightly obnoxious teenage boys? A strict translation would have been the worst insult because we didn’t want to judge them. I handed in a draft and Alfonso gave me notes -- one seemingly anti-American comment, he told me, was a reference to ‘America’ the Mexican soccer team, rather than ‘America’ the country.”

A former journalist and advertising copywriter, Sexton, 42, is part of the hidden world of subtitling, a challenging, arcane milieu that’s a mandatory stop when launching a new film -- or, sometimes, a reissued classic -- into the global marketplace. He’s one of the few translators who are Southern California-based; most translations are done by Americans living in the film’s country of origin or by linguistically savvy locals. English is in particular demand -- it’s the language in which foreign distributors typically view a movie before deciding whether to buy it and subtitle it in their own tongue.

The haiku of the screenwriting world, subtitles are a spare distillation of foreign-language dialogue that are more “adaptation” than “translation,” practitioners say. Artistic license and judgment calls come with the turf, affecting how the movie plays with the audience and the critics. Poor or hard-to-read titles (most notably, white subtitles against a white background) are a thorn in the side of filmmakers and distributors alike, dooming even the best of material. Brilliant subtitles, on the other hand, can win plaudits for foreign filmmakers and attract American audiences to even difficult material.

At no time was that more evident than at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, when two foreign-language films, Pedro Almodovar’s “Talk to Her” and the Cuaron movie, were nominated in the best original screenplay category, a first for the Oscars. Irish-born Deirdre MacCloskey, the midwife for Almodovar’s words, says her goal was capturing the character’s voice rather than injecting her own. A former employee of the British Film Institute who majored in French and Spanish, she started subtitling for a Spanish distributor and has since worked on movies such as Fernando Trueba’s Oscar-winning “Belle Epoque” and the last three from Almodovar.

“Pedro films his own scripts and his words are immensely important to him,” says the 50-year-old Madrid-based translator. “But he likes to have the minimum of subtitles so they don’t detract from the visual. It’s a nightmare when everyone is talking at once or the camera cuts fast between scenes. ‘If I only had another second,’ I tell myself, ‘I could make this so much clearer.’ There’s a richness in the dialogue and you have to sacrifice so much.”

Brooklyn-born Lenny Borger, 51, has translated about 100 films since leaving his post as Variety’s Paris correspondent in 1990. He’s lived half his life in France, as has his American business partner, Cynthia Schoch, 43, a language major who wrote her thesis on subtitling.

“In France, the life of a film is very short and, if you want an afterlife, you have to send it abroad,” said Claude Dupuy, head of subtitling for the Paris- and New York-based LVT Inc. “France is the leader but we’ve sold laser subtitling technology to countries such as China, Japan, Mexico and Spain. In the end, though, the directors, not the labs, line up the translators. Many establish relationships with their own people, with whom they develop a shorthand.”

Schoch, who worked on the DVD versions of such classic films as Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” and Marcel Carne’s “Children of Paradise” with Borger, provides some insights into the translating process. Translators are given “spotting lists,” which break down the dialogue into frames or fractions of seconds to determine how long each title can last, she explains. Not only must they capture the meaning but, even more demanding, everything must fit.

“It’s kind of like doing a crossword puzzle, in that you have a set number of characters you can use,” says Schoch. “Sometimes you have only 25 letters to convey very complex things. And because you can’t translate everything, 40% of the content is lost. Slang and humor are particularly difficult because they’re specific to time and place. No one is ever satisfied, including yourself. Our constant lament: ‘Why don’t directors think of subtitles in advance?’ ”

According to Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker, that’s exactly what Louis Malle did on 1987’s “Au Revoir les Enfants,”a movie he calls a “milestone” in terms of subtitling. When writing the screenplay, the director intentionally kept his sentences short to simplify life on the other end.

Not so Gerard Philipe, director of the 1951 film “Fanfan la Tulipe,” a remake of which, by Gerard Krawczyk, is opening this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Because the director loaded it with the jokes, puns and 17th century slang rattled off fast, it’s a prime candidate for updating.

“Language changes,” says Borger, who has worked on features such as the re-release of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Cercle Rouge” (which recently played in Los Angeles) and Bertrand Tavernier’s “Safe Conduct.” “They say a great novel should be translated every generation and, though it’s economically unfeasible, great films should be, too.

“People take subtitles for granted,” he continues, “but it’s easy to make a mistake. In Alain Tanner’s “A Flame in My Heart,” a guy is coming on to a promiscuous woman and she says, ‘I can’t sleep with you because I have my period.’ That phrase was translated as, ‘I can’t sleep with you because I have my principles’ -- quite a difference. The plural of ‘regle’ can mean either.”

Watching their language

These days, art-house theater-owners regard American independent movies as a better commercial bet than the foreign-language variety. For imports to be at all competitive, quality titles are a must. If the country of origin lacked the money -- or desire -- for a top-of-the line translation, U.S. distributors with an Oscar-caliber film often invest in one themselves.

Germany’s “Nowhere in Africa,” winner of this year’s best foreign language film Oscar, is a recent case in point. Zeitgeist Films, a New York-based company specializing in documentaries and foreign language films, screened the movie at festivals. People liked the movie but found the small, faint titles a problem. To counter the curse of “white on white,” Zeitgeist outlined the letters in black on the movie, now playing on 65 screens nationwide.

“If foreign-language films are saddled with bad subtitles, there’s no way to reach the potential,” said Emily Russo, Zeitgeist’s co-president. “Rather than etching the titles onto each print as we usually do, we created a new negative and reformatted a better subtitle band, over the course of three months. It was an unforeseen expense but worth it, in the end. Legibility is an issue if you want to move beyond art-house audiences, who accept the reality and are a lot more forgiving.”

Even quality subtitles, however, don’t bring in the crowds. “American audiences generally don’t want to go to the movies to read,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co., a firm that monitors box office performance. “They’d rather the experience flow over them, be spoon-fed rather than interactive. Reading dialogue takes them out of the movie, they say, shattering the illusion.”

But Sony Pictures Classics’ Barker maintains that younger audiences are far less resistant to subtitles.

“ ‘Run Lola Run’ and ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ became huge because the younger generation, who are used to reading instant messaging on their home computers and CNN crawls at the bottom of the screen, are much more open to subtitles than people in their 40s and 50s,” he said. “That bodes well for foreign films aimed at a younger audience.”

Still, depending on the type of movie and the sophistication of the audience, dubbing is a viable alternative. While some object to its “tinny” quality and lack of synchronization with lip movement, others (including the late director Stanley Kubrick, Borger says) prefer them to subtitles, which they view as a visual intrusion. Subtitles are fine for “art films” and big cities, American distributors say. But they’re the death knell for action or family movies, and those shown on foreign TV. Companies such as Miramax Films cover both bases, releasing dubbed and subtitled prints of major films, in markets such as Germany, Italy, France and Spain. Recently the studio released two versions of Roberto Benigni’s Italian-language “Pinocchio” in the U.S., first a dubbed version, then a subtitled one. Both were critical and box office disasters.

“The dubbed version was released to broaden the appeal,” says Miramax executive Rick Sands. “We were hoping to find a family audience and kids don’t read subtitles. Generally, Americans don’t embrace dubbed movies; they’re not used to hearing Nicolas Cage with a strange voice.”

However important to a film’s success, subtitling remains undervalued. In France, the fee for translating a new American release is about $3 per title (or a flat $3,000 to $4,000) for jobs lasting a week to 10 days, on average, according to translators. Classic reissues and cable movies pay even less.

Fame, too, remains elusive, since the name of the translator is usually last on the credits, engraved like a subtitle after the copyright. (“Only the ladies sweeping the theater know who I am,” MacCloskey quips.) And given that subtitles are the final stage of movie-making, translators must make up for previous production delays because film festival or release dates won’t change.

No matter, Sexton says. Subtitling is a labor of love -- if not a higher calling. “The greatest achievement is anonymity -- offering what you have in the service of the film,” he says. “The reward is when they talk about the movie -- not you. It’s a good Zen path.”

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Subtitles: the evolution

The current challenges of translation pale in comparison to the early days when studios made multilingual versions of a film.

“Anna Christie” (1930), Greta Garbo’s first talking picture, for example, was released in both English and German. And from 1930 to 1933, Paramount Pictures had a Paris studio turning out assembly-line films, shooting with different casts for as many as eight European markets. Target countries included Portugal, the Netherlands and Romania.

In the mid-1930s, this approach gave way to dubbing and then subtitles, a new, less-expensive process more acceptable to purists partial to the original language. The titles were stamped onto a print with acidic chemicals and often hard to read. Worst of all: Errors or inconsistencies could not be detected until it was too late, when viewing the final product.

The introduction of laser technology in 1988 revolutionized the subtitle industry.

Letter-sized holes created in the film’s silver coating let light through, appearing as white when projected. Eliminating the need for typesetting and metal plates, it takes the beam less than a second to create two-line subtitles in which the characters are much clearer.

Best of all, the titles can be simulated in real time on a video screen before they’re locked in. Sitting in the editing room (often with the director), the translator can fine-tune his work. The French “Regard!,” for instance, can be translated as “look at this” or “look at that,” depending on the actor’s gesture.

France, home to the leading subtitle houses, is considered a leader in the field.

Hong Kong, with its pidgin-English translations of its martial arts films, brings up the rear. Unwilling to pay for translators for whom English is a native tongue, it has sent out titles such as “I got knife scars more than the number of your leg’s hairs” or “Take my advice or I’ll spank you without pants”-- the butt of humor in the trade and a source of countless comedy spoofs.

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How subtitles work

Think it’s easy? You try deciding which dialogue is a “must” and which can fall by the wayside. And keep it short and snappy. If the language is stilted or runs too long, you’re bound to lose your audience.

Here are some tricks to the trade.

Rules of thumb: There are about 24 frames of film per second, each containing no more than 15 characters (spaces included). In an ideal world, the title must begin and end when the speaker does and avoid dribbling into the next frame. On 35-millimeter film, titles can’t exceed two lines, with a maximum of 40 characters on each. Translators turn out about 1,000 to 1,200 subtitles for an average 100-minute feature. (Cheating is permissible, they concede, to squeeze in the requisite information.)

Translators approach subtitling like a screenplay, beginning with the research. In addition to dictionaries and reference books, experts are often called in. After watching a video of the film, they knock out a first draft. “Spotting lists,” indicating how long each title can last, are an invaluable road map. Most directors weigh in on the translation -- especially if they can speak the target language. Occasionally, they’ll accompany the subtitler in the editing room, viewing the time-coded titles on-screen.