Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
Synchronization is a tricky little bugger, isn’t it? First off, there is always something that gets lost in translation; many fine points of the original language always go out the window. Take any film in an unknown language: do you opt for the subtitles, or do you press the button that puts foreign words in the mouths of the cast? I mostly go for subtitles, because even if I don’t understand Toshiro Mifune’s precise words, I want to hear his drawls, his mutterings and his shouts. I want to be there when he finally tips over the edge and goes berserk, even if that does not involve much dialogue – either grunts and shouts, or total silence. Him unsheathing his sword is just not enough.
There are so many examples of very bad synchronization that it’s surprising that no-one has made a documentary about them. Take, for instance, Susie Diamond in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), when she sees Jack Baker get into his clothes after they’ve spent a night of highly overdue lovemaking. “You’d make a hell of a fireman, you know that?” (at around 1:09 hours’ running time) There is of course the statement behind her reproach that she wants him to stay just a little bit longer, but there is also the sense that fire has played a role during the previous night. The German synchronization puts a full stop to that allusion and lets Susie say: “You get into your clothes faster than a fireman.” It comes down on the side of the accusation and wipes the passionate aspect of her words aside, or at the very least dampens it. I am sure there are much worse examples, some of them truly cringeworthy even to seasoned moviegoers, but since synchronization, certainly in English-speaking movies, are not an option to me, I have happily avoided most of them.
Why, then, synchronization? Well, sometimes it works if the right people take care of it. In the original Brother Bear (2003), the two moose providing most of the comic relief, Rutt and Tuke, are voiced by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, two Canadian actors and comedians, whose skits featuring themselves as two dim-witted, stereotypical Canadian brothers were famous more than twenty years ago. While the name Rick Moranis may be familiar to German-speaking audiences because of Ghostbusters (1984) and Spaceballs (1987), nobody in Europe could point out Dave Thomas from a line-up. So the crew responsible for the German synchronization realized this and got creative. They renamed the two moose Benny and Björn, after the two male ABBA members, and let them speak German with a generic Scandinavian slant. Let me tell you that it works a treat.
Synchronization always falls short of the original. While that sounds like a problem, it can also be liberating to realize that, while some of the original message has to be preserved, it’s fine to take advantage of that fine linguistic gap and do something with the untranslatable lines and use them to insert something that will not diminish the movie, but add something to the foreign version – a regional in-joke, a quip, a funny accent that means something to the audience in question. That can travel quite well because in the above excerpt, Björn and Benny are of such wide-spread fame that the joke goes well beyond the version for German-speaking audiences.
This is what synchronization should do at its best: it should realize that it probably cannot live up to the linguistic finesse of the original dialogue, and so should try to fill it with something fitting that does not hurt the main plot, but adds something to the movie for an audience that would otherwise not be allowed to fully enjoy the film.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 
3 thoughts on “Six Damn Fine Degrees #178: Tell me in your own words”