Never Mind the Gap: Reflections on the Costs of Translation in Film and Elsewhere

Rayya Badran: I would have to rummage through years’ worth of handwritten notes to find one and I am sure there are many encounters that made a mark, I just can’t recall one now. I frequently bemoan the time when we watched films with both Arabic and French subtitles. It’s kind of wild to have text and translation be so central to the cinematic experience at such a young age. Perhaps it even forged my love of translation and subtitles in general.

• SM: I am reminded of an old (now-defunct) custom in Bollywood film credits, where the Hindi title of the film would always be displayed together with English and Urdu (Perso-Arabic script) transliterations. I remember when I was in Egypt and someone told me they loved the movie «الشعلة» [al-shu‘lah], and I realized they were talking about none other than the famous 1970s Bollywood action thriller Sholay, written in Urdu as شعلے. It created a linguistic connection for me between the cradle tongue and the adopted language that persists until today.
  
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• OB: This brings to mind a video work by Algerian artist Katia Kameli, The Storyteller (2012). The video was shot in Marrakech, and has as its protagonist Abderrahim Al-Azalia, a well-known ḥlāyqī (circle storyteller) of the Jemaa el Fna square. Azalia starts to tell a story of friendship, hope, and social exclusion in Moroccan Darija, which sounds perfectly “local,” until the video cuts to an excerpt of Satyen Bose's classic 1964 Bollywood film Dosti, picking up where Azalia left off. The video then keeps going back and forth between the film and the storyteller. It turns out Azalia was known for going to a film theater by the Jemaa El Fna square that mostly showed Bollywood films. After watching a movie, he would come out to the square and tell the story, in Darija and with the narrative codes of traditional ḥalqa (circle), to people who may not have been able to afford the ticket.
  

Omar Berrada: This was an indirect encounter. Itto (1934), directed in Morocco by French filmmakers Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein, was claimed to be the first Tamazight-speaking film. Decades later, while manipulating reels from Itto on an editing table at the National Cinema Center, Moroccan filmmaker and writer Ahmed Bouanani realized that some of the “Amazigh” dialogue was simply French played backwards. The colonial strategy of valorizing local languages through film was simply the flip side of contempt.

• MHK: This case is so outrageous. Part of why I can relate is how my own Nubian language (Nobiin/Fadiji) was used in old B&W movies (directed by non-Nubian Egyptians): for comic purposes, never translated as though it was not a language at all. Indeed, Nubians used to be called barabra just as Amazigh used to be called Berber—both variations on the word “barbarian” and its Greek origin bárbaros, which came to mean “savages.” The etymology is telling of the roots of these acts of linguistic violence at play in French or Egyptian cinema, where Western colonialism and Arab/Egyptian nationalism are revealed to be in tandem.
  

Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat: Once I had learnt enough English to comfortably understand it, I started noticing how the Arabic subtitling of English-language films in Egypt often diverged from the original dialogue, having been censored. This made me acutely aware of the dual realities inhabited by film audiences, or how censored subtitles divided the audiences of the same country into two groups: those who understood the uncensored dialogue without subtitles, with all its profanity, blasphemy, and taboos, and those who understood the film’s events and dialogue through the lens of a deliberately unfaithful translation. This duality, bound to language as a form of guardianship and covert violence, is captured with remarkable sensitivity in a scene from Dogtooth (2009) by Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. The film tells the story of children raised by their parents in complete isolation from society until well into their adulthood. In this particular scene, the father plays his grown sons and daughters a song by their “grandfather” (“Fly Me to the Moon,” in Frank Sinatra’s voice), “translating” the lyrics: “Daddy loves us. Mommy loves us. Do we love them? Yes, we do. I love my siblings. Because they love us too.” The grown children listen intently, visibly moved, and when the “translation” ends, they smile joyfully and dance to the song.

Rana Issa: I sometimes think about Jean-Luc Godard’s films through the lens of translation— Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976) and Notre Musique (Our Music, 2004) in particular. In these two films, Godard offers us a visual vocabulary for contemplating the problems of translation. The camera translates between two interconnected realities that differ in the intensity of violence they contain yet are implicated in one another. One, Palestinian, knows its counterpart intimately, having been shaped by the violence inflicted by the other upon its land. The other, European, remains ignorant and indifferent. The director/translator steps in to articulate an alternative narrative that might have no place within European reality. In translating it, he carries it across, thereby opening up the possibility of conversing, dialogue, and accountability.

Araz Kojayan: During the 1990s, Lebanese television channels started showing Mexican telenovelas dubbed into fuṣḥā, or Standard Arabic. I’d watch the actors’ mouths move out of sync with the words I was hearing, the same Arabic I was learning in school but never actually using day-to-day. I remember once wanting to tell my neighbor that it was raining, so I said ‘am yinzal maṭar [precipitation is falling] instead of the more colloquial ‘am bitšattī [it’s raining]. As a child speaking Armenian at home, taking pride in understanding fuṣḥā and amassing new vocabulary was an important part of the pleasure of watching, I guess.

• OB: Are you familiar with Omar Mismar's 2018 video work Lucía Mendez and the Peace in Lebanon? Lucía Mendez is the Mexican actress who starred in Tú o nadie, the first telenovela that aired in Lebanon in 1992. Mismar contacted her 25 years later, saying that, perhaps unbeknownst to her, she was responsible for peace in Lebanon: Since all factions were glued to their screens watching her, they did not go back to fighting one another. In the video, Mismar coaches Mendez to “read,” on camera, the Ta'if Accords in Arabic, as a kind of address to Lebanese people. As the synopsis states, the work “fancies a connection between the Ta’if as a dub to the Civil War, and between Lucía Méndez as a representation and extension of the post-war Ta’ifization of cultural production.” Of course, ironically, most viewers of Mismar's video installation would be hearing Mendez's voice for the first time, being familiar only with her (fuṣḥā) Arabic dubber's voice. 
  
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• SM: Didn't people start referring to Standard Arabic as miksīkī at some point?
  

Lina Mounzer: I have always hated dubbing and am surprised that anyone would deliberately choose to watch a dubbed film over a subtitled one. I think of dubbing as a translation in three dimensions whereas subtitles are two-dimensional. This is not at all to say subtitles are lesser—to me they are the superior form of film translation because they leave the acting choices to the original director and allow the viewer to focus more exclusively on the dialogue and its intentions.

Suneela Mubayi: One of the ways I improved my reading speed in Arabic was by watching Hollywood films on MBC and other (Gulf-owned) satellite channels while reading the fuṣḥā subtitles. The societal and religious morals that dominated the targeted distribution market, as Nour’s pamphlet mentions, dictated that, for example, “Did you f**k her?” would be translated as the more sanitary «هل أقمت علاقة معها؟» [Did you have a relationship with her?]. But more quirky was the oratory register overlaid by the use of fuṣḥā, so that “F**k you” became the scriptural-sounding «تبّاً لك» [Woe unto you], or “What’s up/wrong, man?” became «ما الخطبُ يا صاح؟» [Whatever is amiss, fellow?]. The resulting discursive dissonance would always make me guffaw inwardly (or out loud!), and watching an otherwise boring or stereotypically American film became an amusing  experience.

Hussein Nassereddine: I remember the moment we discovered a website where we could download subtitle files for the films we bought or pirated as teenagers. We didn’t speak English then, and it was difficult for us to follow films in languages other than Arabic when the only available subtitles were in either English or French. So we began revisiting films we had already seen without understanding the dialogue. Sometimes, the films we had imagined were more beautiful than what they turned out to be once we finally understood what was being said.
 

Rayya Badran: I came across this phrase in a love song by Sudanese composer and songwriter Mostafa Sid Ahmed. It’s not a particularly difficult one to translate but it’s been on my mind: عارفني منّك [‘ārifnī minnak]. You know I’m yours. You know I belong to you. You know I am of you?

Omar Berrada: I could say ṭarab, I could say qahr, I could say ḥogra, I could say takbīr… But rather than search for unreachable synonymity, I prefer to focus on the rich linguistic and conceptual space opened by the gap between a word and its (im)possible translations. Barbara Cassin once edited a philosophical dictionary of untranslatables. Its premise was that an ‘untranslatable’ is not a word one cannot translate, but a word one never stops (not) translating.

Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat: In Ways of Seeing, John Berger’s book based on the TV series, there’s a discussion that builds on Kenneth Clark’s ideas, dissecting the act of looking as a political act that profoundly shapes our relationship to our own bodies and to those of others. At some point in the argument, we become ready to grasp the difference between taʿarrī  (nakedness) andʿury (nudity) as they were translated in the Arabic edition. But how much can these two words—whether in English or Arabic—convey that meaning, that distinction, on their own? The difficulty of translation here lies not (only) between one language and another, but first between the idea and language itself, and then between language and its speakers. For language to perform its function, there is a prerequisite labor: the labor of life itself.

Rana Issa: I am currently working on an Arabic translation of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s book, as part of a collective of translators from Morocco, Egypt, Palestine, and myself from Lebanon. More often than not, translation compels us to move beyond established equivalents, to coin new terms or rearrange meaning around a particular word. Our different dialects have come to our rescue on many occasions. One term we are still questioning is the use of the word “maroon” in the book. The concept carries a historical legacy that is connected to slavery, referring to the enslaved people who escaped from their masters into the mountains, where they established small communities beyond the reach of the law. What equivalent can Arabic offer? For our first draft, we chose the Egyptian colloquial term maṭārīd. The suggestion came from our Egyptian colleague, and it, too, carries its own history. Maṭārīd refers to bands of “outlaws” who lived in the mountains, mostly in Upper Egypt, formerly known as falātiyya. The phenomenon dates back to the Memluk era, and these communities were made up of people who rejected official authority, whether their criminal acts were directed against the state or against the public at large. But can we really equate the maṭārīd with the maroons? Or should we transliterate the word into Arabic as mārūn, at the risk of readers in the Mashriq mistaking it for a reference to the Maronites of Mount Lebanon? One of us suggested the word ābiq, meaning a runaway slave. Perhaps ābiq would be a better equivalent than “runaway” for translating “fugitive,” another key term in the book. Yet ābiq does not carry the historical weight of the enslavement of Africans by Europeans—a history we are trying, as much as possible, to preserve in our translation of “maroon.”

Araz Kojayan: Ma btekmal bala ma tekmal [literally: it’s not complete till it’s complete] is a phrase that took me forever to grasp, let alone translate to English and Armenian. It was also the title of a short video my friend and I produced with young women from across Lebanon, representing different sects, whom we brought together for an interreligious initiative about the role of women in their respective religions. My native Arabic-speaking friends had difficulty explaining the phrase to me, especially when it came to translating it to English and Armenian for subtitling purposes. In retrospect, it was simple: No community is complete without the participation of women. 

Lina Mounzer: I recall no particular word or phrase but family relations have always been difficult to translate from Arabic to English. The nuance of a mother addressing her child as ya mama or a father as ya baba, whether in utmost tenderness or, worse, in exasperation—that mode of address relays an entire way of being very particular to Arab families that is near impossible to convey in English.

Suneela Mubayi: I’ve been learning Norwegian intensively for more than a year and am trying my hand at interpreting. The logic of the language is so different from Arabic, whose entire system is built around deriving words from triliteral and quadriliteral roots and the fine semantic distinctions that they generate. What I find perplexing is that if I want to translate a word like  taḥawwala (transformed) or uḥīla (to be transferred), the equivalent in Norwegian changes entirely depending on the context: whether a person has transformed from one thing into another, whether a patient has been transferred from the emergency department to surgery, or whether an event marked a turning point in the country’s history. While memorizing legal terminology, I came across several terms that I struggled to translate into either Arabic or English. Take the Norwegian word rettssikkerhet (literally: legal security), a concept referring to the fact that we live in a state governed by the rule of law, one that guarantees each of us legal rights before the courts and safeguards them even against the state itself. What I mean to say is that I realize how every bureaucratic system develops concepts that resist easy comprehension, and therefore easy translation, precisely because they do not exist in other systems. Take ikhrāj qayd—the civil registry extract used in the Levant—as an example. There is simply no equivalent to it in the United States or the United Kingdom!

Hussein Nassereddine: ‘Umr is a word I use frequently in my writing and performance work. Despite its apparent simplicity, it is difficult to translate because it embodies a relationship to time, and an understanding of life and death, that belongs to the regions and communities that think, speak, and live in Arabic. I have yet to find an equivalent in English or French.

• SM: It exists in Persian and Urdu too (and probably in other languages whose vocabularies were shaped by the passage of Arabic). In India, for example, the official term for a life sentence is ‘umr qaid (lifetime imprisonment).
  
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• RB: Like the expression al-‘umr ilak (literally: may the lifetime be yours).
  

 

Rayya Badran: I think (a lot) about this piece by Lina Mounzer, a translator and writer I admire, entitled “Trash Talk: On Translating Garbage.” Here’s an excerpt:

• As for the pleasure that can be derived from translating garbage, it is, fittingly, a little trashier in nature. Sitting over coffee with a friend one day, I tried to describe the feeling of doing work you love in principle but often find impossible to love in the moment. Of getting intimate with a text you have nothing but disdain for, but having it get under your skin nevertheless, so that little snatches of it keep flashing into your head all day, long after you’ve walked away.
  
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• “Like a hate-fuck?” he said.
  
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• “Yes!” I said. “Exactly like a hate-fuck.”
  

• MHK: This piece was a great consolation when it came out. It still is. For instance, when I'm translating academic English and almost want to kill myself. I mean, how mechanically efficient English has become and how violent it is to try and force that into the Arabic language in a manner that should satisfy all the parties involved: make sense to them, read smoothly and naturally, be consistent with the existing Arabic terminology, and sound grotesque and literal enough so those accustomed to reading bad translations can feel familiar with it… 
  
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Omar Berrada: Many years ago, I avidly read the writings of French translator and translation theorist, Antoine Berman. One phrase has stayed with me ever since. It appears in L’épreuve de l’étranger, in the middle of a paragraph, as though written off-handedly. In it, Berman characterizes translation as “an act of self-conscious creative decentering.” To me, that is one of the most concisely potent descriptions of translation. Every word here is crucial: act, self-conscious, creative, decentering.

Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”—a quote attributed to Robert Frost—held me captive for a long time, instilling in me a strange feeling, perhaps the comfort of resignation. Over time, however, I came to see its problems, quite apart from the fact that we do not even know the context in which it was said or what precisely was meant by it. Taken at face value, it amounts to a false and rather smug piece of wisdom: that translation is impossible, and that poetry, in its broadest sense, is not universal. In fact, the statement is true only when reversed: Poetry is what survives translation. What is lost in a careful and serious translation of poetry—in the broadest sense of the term, including the poetry of prose and of everyday speech—is not poetry itself, but elements specific to the language or culture from which it is translated: a certain musicality, verbal nuances, wordplay, and the like.

Rana Issa: Alexander Balanescu and Ada Milea collaborated on an album called The Island (2011), a mini-opera written and sung in English, based on a Romanian play that is in turn based on the famous English novel Robinson Crusoe. I have often thought of this novel and its paradigmatic impact on thinking translation in colonized cultures. Its Arabic translation was the work of Butrus al-Bustani. In the mini-opera by Balanescu and Milea, specifically in the song titled “Friday,” the slave is stealing the names of things from his master, Robinson. The irony of the song, and the absurdity of certain acts of translation and the power differentials that they enact have always been with me, whenever I wanted to teach about the perils of translation. What problems can translation create between two cultures? Meawnhile, there is what Fred Moten said to us when we met with him to discuss the translation work. He called the act of translation “breath.” For Moten, to translate a text is to breathe it into life; in fact, a text only comes alive as it is translated. This breath, or the notion that translation is breath, is one that I think defines my own practice and the translation projects I embark on.

Araz Kojayan: In this excerpt from his first monologue entitled Yevyalen (Et Cetera, 2000), Vahe Berberian humorously recounts the literal way in which Armenians in Bourj Hammoud translated English movie titles to Armenian, e.g. “Horrorents Duneh” for House of Horror or “Hood Yeghparnere” for The Brotherhood. He then imagines FBI wiretappers baffled by elderly Armenians speaking English but thinking in Armenian, producing gems like “the place where the monkey died” (when it’s too far) and “let me eat your liver, brother” (to express affection).

Lina Mounzer: My encounter with Lawrence Venuti’s ideas about domestication and foreignization in translation really changed my entire approach and understanding of it. He defines “domestication” as “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values,” and maintains that translation is inherently violent, with its violence “resid[ing] in its very purpose and activity: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs, and representations that pre-exist it in the target language.” Whereas I used to be much more concerned with sounding native in the target language, I now prioritize a kind of transplantation, like taking a native plant from one soil and trying to give it everything it needs to survive in a new soil, foreign to it.

• OB: I absolutely love the spin you put on it, with this imperative of care that is inherent to transplantation ("giving it everything it needs to survive") but whose rules are not pre-set, as they must be reinvented for each situation—different texts need different things to survive. There is no translation formula. This is resonant with a passage from a 1917 work by Rudolf Pannwitz, which Benjamin quotes in “The Task of the Translator:” our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works. […] The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.
  
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• RI: I love this term Lina. It makes me think of Humphrey Davies and his work in transplanting Arabic books on Anglophone soil. He would have identified with it as a description of his labor.
  

Suneela Mubayi: There are several poems by the late Iraqi-Assyrian Sargon Boulos that in a sense I live by. One of them, called «تعويدة للعائش في الطوفان», or “An Amulet for Life in the Deluge” (1996), has in a way defined my precarious existence in this world through language. Another one I really like is «اللاجئ يحكي», or “A Refugee Talking” (2007) – I recommend listening to the audio recording in his voice – where he says at the end:

• He talks, talks, talks
  
• He had arrived but did not enjoy the taste of arrival
  
• And did not feel the cigarette burn his fingers

I have thought of this poem a lot when meeting Syrians and Palestinians here (in Oslo), in Berlin, and in New York (and earlier in Beirut), and have wondered to myself in the middle of the conversation whether, after everything many of them went through, that we must by necessity ignore so we can sit calmly in the very banal moment, they could feel the cigarette burning their fingers (or the alcohol burning their throat).

Hussein Nassereddine:

• b. “inversion of the metaphor”: See above, viz. our discussion on entering poetic time. In poetic time, metaphors are inverted or reversed, i.e. they become clear, and thus there is no need for metaphor. In other words, he who enters poetic time will see things before they can be likened to something else—that is, before metaphor might even occur. Thus when we say that ʿAbd Allah entered poetic time and saw the palm trees, we are saying that the pillars in their pre-metaphor form were the palms. In other words, the pillars were originally palm trees, and all ʿAbd Allah the Slain did was see them—that is, he saw them as they were in poetic time.
  
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—From my book: Hussein Nassereddine, How to see palace pillars as if they were palm trees, English translation by Ben Koerber (Kayfa ta, 2019).