Putting words in your mouth AKA DUBBING (episode 1)
People in this episode:
- Benoit Allemane, French actor who provides the French voice for Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones
- Emmanuelle Ben Hadj (Phd), teaches English and Film at the Université Lyon 2 in France
- Jean Francois Cornu, Audio visual translator and author of the book Le doublage et le sous-titrage: Histoire et esthétique
SCRIPT
(NATS: Morgan Freeman: First night in Shawshank VO)
That’s the inimitable Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption.
(NATS: Morgan Freeman: First night in Shawshank VO)
But for some 67 million people, when they watch that scene, this is what they hear.
(NATS: Benoit Allemane: First night Shawshank VF)
As a whole – the U-S doesn’t have a lot of experience with dubbing. A few foreign films were propelled into pop culture…
(NATS: I’ll let you try my Wu Tang style)
But with Hollywood dominating the screens at home, the average American has only had limited exposure. That is until recently. In the past few years, Netflix had massive hits in the U-S with foreign shows like South Korea’s Squid Game, France’s Lupin, and to a lesser extent Germany’s Dark.
(Pause SFX)
I’m just going to pause for a second here to talk about Dark. Seriously, I don’t think it gets the attention it deserves. It’s one of the best shows I’ve seen. I just love it, and if you haven’t seen it, you really should. Ok. Un-pause.
(Pause SFX)
Squid Game in particular ignited a fierce debate about whether the show should be watched dubbed or with subtitles. The creator even weighed in - telling fans to please watch the subtitled version. Now, as a French person – there was only one choice, and that’s dubbed. To me it’s a no brainer. Even now, when I watch a French show with my wife – who doesn’t speak French – we watch it dubbed in English. Dubbing doesn’t bother me at all. That’s in big part because of how the movie industry solved the problem of releasing films in foreign countries after the first talking picture, and how those solutions became regulated.
(NATS: You ain’t heard nothin’ yet)
The Jazz Singer was released in Europe in 1929. Before that, the title cards between scenes – which were then called subtitles but are now referred to as inter-titles – would be translated into the local language of the country where the film was being released.
[CORNU] For example an American film with English inter-titles would be distributed in Europe, In Germany or in France, Italy. And they would have adapted inter-titles into those languages, French, Italian, German, but they were not always exactly similar to the original English title cards.
This is Jean Francois Cornu.
[CORNU] I’m an audio visual translator and I also translate books on film and art in general, but my passion for film translation led me to write a book on the history of film subtitling and dubbing.
That book is Le doublage et le sous-titrage: Histoire et esthétique. Which roughly translates to Dubbing and subtitling: History and aesthetic. So, for the silent era the studios had figured out how to reach foreign markets, but with The Jazz Singer they ran into a new problem.
[CORNU] The Jazz Singer has mostly inter-titles because it is 80 or 85% silent. But the scenes that were actually spoken and obviously sung as well by Al Jolson people didn’t understand them. And beyond the first surprise or amazement at seeing and hearing a film with speaking characters, people started to get fed up and said well it’s nice to hear people speak but we would like them to speak our own language.
France and Germany were two major markets for Hollywood films outside of the U-S. So there was a financial interest in getting this figured out.
[CORNU] They recouped most of their investments with the help of the foreign markets.
(Pause SFX)
I think it’s interesting that Hollywood has sort of always been beholden to foreign markets. The puzzle studios are trying to solve now is how to make their movies more palatable to China – because that is where some of them are making the bulk of their revenue.
(Pause SFX)
When talking pictures first came out, the studios tried to use subtitles because that’s something they knew how to do, but Cornu says it didn’t work all that well.
[CORNU] Dialogue was translated in America by people who didn’t always master the languages into which they were translating. There were also technical problems in terms of legibility.
Necessity became the mother of invention. In the early 30’s American studios tried all sorts of things to keep their share of the European market. They want actors speaking their language? OK. We’ll give them actors speaking their own language. Early on they shot multiple language versions of the same movie. This meant filming the movie with American actors in English, and with French actors in French, and so on… For as many versions of the picture as countries the studios were trying to reach.
[CORNU] Different crews or group of actors would follow each other - shoot the same scene in their own language one after the other, and the film would be practically always similar - be similar, visually similar.
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It started with all of the different language actors in the U-S. But, thanks to a new filming technique patented by C. Dodge Dunning, the studios were able to have some different language versions shot overseas. The Dunning process is an ancestor to the blue screen technology used today. It was notably used as a special effect in the 1933 version of King Kong.
For multiple language versions, the backgrounds would be shot in the U-S and then sent to Europe where local actors would act out the scenes in front of blue screens, and then both images would be merged. According to Cornu the Dunning method was easy to spot. The actors would be framed by a thin black line that betrayed the effect. You can see its telltale trace in movies from the 30’s to the 70’s.
In the span of two years, more than 80 films were shot in multiple versions. Cornu says at least one movie was produced that way in 30 different languages. Of course, it wasn’t cheap to produce multiple versions of the same movie. And some films would even be directed by different people when shot in a different language, so the results could vary from the American version. Ultimately, the problem was that those versions didn’t have the star power the audience wanted.
[CORNU] When unknown actors speaking French or Italian or German were in those versions, people in Europe enjoyed the fact that the characters were speaking in their own language, but they lacked the star quality of the movie so that didn’t last long either.
Meanwhile, people in the U-S, France, and Germany were experimenting with dubbing techniques. At the time, only American studios could isolate the voice tracks, so when movies were dubbed overseas they would have to recreate every audio element, including the music. Some of the studios like M-G-M and Fox set up their own facilities in Paris and Berlin to oversee the dubbing process and keep safeguards on the films. The real challenge remained to synchronize the new voice in a different language to the mouth movements on the film.
[CORNU] The major problem with dubbing is that you have to give the impression to the audience that the people you watch on the screen are actually – are really talking the language that you can hear.
So the creatives… got creative. We can’t make the dialogue sync up overseas? Ok. How about we make movies with less dialogue and more action scenes! What if we remove the close up shots of people talking before shipping the movie to foreign markets? Or we could cut to the shot of the other actor while lines are being delivered? They tried all of that. Thankfully for those early non-English speaking movie goers, those solutions didn’t last.
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There was also a short-lived hybrid of dubbing and multiple language versions. American actors would mime the dialogue in a different language to the best of their ability, and while that was going on, other actors in sound proof booths would be recording the same lines in real time.
[CORNU] It was very briefly used because it was not exactly satisfying.
Dubbing was already proving to be cheaper than making multiple language versions, giving Hollywood a financial incentive to dub movies, and then on July 21st, 1932, dubbing got a major boost from the French government. From then on, only a handful of movie theaters in the country could show subtitled versions of foreign films. Foreign movies playing anywhere else had to be dubbed into French, and that dubbing had to take place in France.
[CORNU] The French dubbed films that were made in America they didn’t sound too natural to French speakers because they were done by people who sometimes were not experimented actors, or French actors who had been in America for a while and who are not in touch with the way French was being spoken back in France.
But Cornu says the decision was mainly made because of economics. The decree protected the budding French movie and dubbing industries. There would be a limit to how many American movies could be imported, which lowered the competition for French films, and the dubbing of American movies would be done entirely in France by French people which would guarantee jobs. The governments of Italy, Germany, and later Spain made similar decisions, but they were made for overtly political and ideological reasons.
[CORNU] Dubbing is definitely used … as a weapon basically. To keep any … foreign influence as they called it basically at bay. Which was not so much… not as strongly stressed in France.
Dubbing was also viewed as something that could protect domestic languages.
[CORNU] Mussolini made a point of using Italian, strictly Italian in Italian films even for foreign films because it was also a way of unifying the country through the language.
That’s not to say the French government definitely didn’t engage in a similar reasoning when it came to protecting its language or culture, but if it did, it didn’t proclaim it. In France, the rule ended up setting the taste and the expectation of the public and made dubbing the de-facto standard.
[CORNU] Dubbing gradually, you know year after year, became a habit for the audience because of that legislation. And it’s still the case now.
In the time it took for dubbing to impose itself as the answer to playing American movies in foreign markets, different dubbing techniques were tried, tested, and improved. By the mid to late 30’s the American studios had figured out how to create Music and Effects tracks – also known as M&E tracks – so when they would send a movie to be dubbed in Europe, the people working on the local version would only need to worry about recording dialogue. They didn’t need to re-create all of the other sounds. It was less time consuming, and it also protected the integrity of the films by limiting the amount of creative choices that could be made before they were shown in other countries. By then, the way films were dubbed already looked very similar to what is still in use today. First the dialogue needs to be translated.
[BEN HADJ] Dubbing is making… it’s making a lot of tough decisions.
Emmanuelle Ben Hadj has a PhD in Film Studies and currently teaches English and Film at Université Lyon 2 in France.
[BEN HADJ] Ten years ago I was an audio-visual translator for French television in Paris.
She says the translation needs to account for both the original meaning of the dialogue and the mouth synchronization in the new text.
[BEN HADJ] Everything is in your head. It’s all about knowing the English language, and the French language, and knowing vocabulary, synonyms. And you know you just… You get used to it and you learn tricks.
Even simple greetings require special attention.
[BEN HADJ] In English they say “hi” so you open your mouth. In French it’s “salut” and “salut” when you make that “u” sound your mouth is very different than when you say “hi.” So, you cannot say “salut” in the French dubbing. You have to make them say “hey” so they can open their mouths the same way.
I asked her about translating the word “apple,” which is “pomme” in French, because it seemed to me like it would be hard to synchronize. She said that was actually pretty easy because the consonant can act as an anchor to what’s on the video.
[BEN HADJ] So you have “apple,” “pomme.” Because you have that “p” sound you’re just going to try to insert “pomme” at the moment when they’re saying the “p” sound in “apple.”
The translation is written in a software that attaches the new dialogue to the video – precise down to the millisecond.
[BEN HADJ] And so you stop, you start. You stop, you start. It’s an endless process.
Ben Hadj says translators can find themselves with no other choice but to change the meaning of the original dialogue because of the constraints of the mouth movements on the screen.
[BEN HADJ] Sometimes you have to find mechanisms to put the information somewhere else. You see? Like, if they’re absolutely talking about I don’t know I’m making something up like gardening, but the translation for the word cannot possibly match the mouth movements. Then you need to take that information and insert it somewhere else in the conversation. ‘Cause you don’t want to lose that gardening meaning if it’s important. So you’ll just take it and insert it somewhere else. If you need to.
It’s a slow process. It takes about a month to write the dialogue in a new language. To make matters even more complicated, the translators don’t always have a copy of the original script of the film or TV show they’re working on.
[BEN HADJ] Sometimes with dubbing you get stuck. And it’s very stressful. It’s very frustrating because you cannot change what they’re saying on the screen. You cannot change the mouth movements. You just need to find a way around it.
Once the written translation is done, it goes to French actors who perform the script.
[BEN HADJ] Basically they are in a studio. They have a big screen and on top they have the film or the TV show – so they have the image – and then on the bottom they have my script. It’s a really hard job because they have to read my script as the movie is playing so their voice can be recorded onto the movie.
For the sake of continuity, A-list American actors tend to have their own dedicated performer acting as their French voice for extended periods of time.
[ALLEMANE] Je m’appelle Benoit Allemane et je suis comédien. Tout simplement.
Benoit Allemane has been the French voice of Morgan Freeman since the early 90’s.
(NATS shawshank redemption VO / VF montage)
The Shawshank Redemption – or Les Évadés as it’s known in the French version – was his first time dubbing for Freeman.
[ALLEMANE] J’ai été choisi à l'époque par la production Américaine. Y avaient fait passer des auditions et j’avais été retenu pour heu… pour doubler Morgan Freeman.
Wait… This isn’t going to work. Hang on, I think I might have something for this. Ladies and Gentleman, the American voice of the French voice of Morgan Freeman – Mister Morgan Freeman!! Nah. Just kidding. The Morgan Freeman people never answered my request. Neither did Netflix or Disney for that matter. So, we’ll just have to go with something more within my budget.
[ALLEMANE INTERPRETED] I was chosen at the time by the American production. They were holding castings and I was selected to dub Morgan Freeman. And from that point on I started dubbing almost all of his movies.
(Pause SFX)
Dubbing the French actor who dubs Morgan Freeman in an episode about dubbing. So Meta. Anyways…
(Pause SFX)
Allemane says a French subsidiary was in charge of holding the casting, but the tapes were then sent to the American studio – or at least representatives in Paris – and they made the final choice. Since then he pretty much gets a phone call every time Morgan Freeman acts in a new movie or voices a documentary.
[ALLEMANE INTERPRETED] Usually it’s automatic. Except for the three or four I didn’t do. For example, Nelson Mandela. When mister Freeman interpreted the role of Nelson Mandela, all of the characters around Mandela were African. So, the French voices of all of those characters around Mandela needed to have an African musicality in the way they talked. And I don’t have it. That’s why I didn’t dub Morgan Freeman in Nelson Mandela.
When it comes to dubbing, he sees himself as a servant to the role.
[ALLEMANE INTERPRETED] We’re not doing karaoke. We’re not doing an imitation. If you want to dub well, you have to immerse yourself in the feeling that animated the actor when the scenes were shot. And the character that was played.
All the while keeping up the artifice of synchronization.
[ALLEMANE INTERPRETED] The actor must deliver the lines exactly in the same rhythm, and with the same intention, and with the same feeling, and the same breathing pattern as the actor being dubbed.
In his experience – French dialogue tends to run 25 percent longer than the original, so he commends the work of the people who translate the script for finding the right words. First he’ll watch the scene several times in the original language, then he’ll start recording. It can take up to ten takes to nail a 50 second scene. That’s in part because dubbing actors also have to contend with the Music and Effects track.
[ALLEMANE INTERPRETED] In a lot of American films, the music is very loud. So you have to be very careful. We have to be understood. American actors when they shoot a scene, they don’t talk very loud. When you hear the original voice, they’re not talking loud. The French actor expresses himself much more strongly.
Allemane credits the sound engineers he works with for making sure his delivery matches the level of the M&E track, and for the final step in synchronizing the French dialogue with the on screen mouth movements. There is a drawback to having every actor come to a soundproof booth to record dialogue.
[CORNU] When you listen to a French dubbed film, all the voices, whether they’re .. the scene is happening outside on location, or in a place where there would be maybe echoes or reverberations or simply in a crowd for example the voices are all on the same sound pane. There’s no depth. Or there’s very little effort to achieve some sort of sound depth as you would have a visual depth.
Again: Jean Francois Cornu. He also thinks the French dubbing style gives too much importance to syncing the new dialogue to the lips of the actors on screen. But what about when the characters are drawn and singing?
(NATS Let It Go VO)
Cornu says Disney’s made a point of dubbing its movies since the original Snow White came out in 1938.
[CORNU] For the songs they usually, the companies usually hired lyricists. People who knew how to write lines and lyrics to be actually sung.
Disney has a good track record of turning American bangers into European bops. But there have been some misses.
[BEN HADJ] Many people hated the dubbed version of Frozen because the dubbing especially during the songs was absolutely terrible.
(NATS Let It Go VF)
Emmanuelle Ben Hadj.
[BEN HADJ] The dubbing on the Let It Go song in particular was terrible.
(NATS Let It Go VF)
[BEN HADJ] It was mocked. Very heavily. Even though the Let It Go song is super popular in France. Even in its French version. I think it’s called Liberée Delivrée that’s the French title of the song. The song is super popular because kids love it but the dubbing of the song in the movie was mocked.
(NATS Let It Go VF)
Presumably most of you listening don’t speak French. So, here are some highlights. “The wind that howls in me is no longer thinking about tomorrow. It is way too strong. I fought in vain. I left my childhood in summer. Lost in the winter, the cold is the price of my freedom. I want to see what I can do with this magic full of mystery. Good. Bad. I say oh well. Liberated. Rescued. The stars are reaching out to me.” Disney’s streaming service offers multiple language options for a lot of content. Many movies are available in French. But not Frozen. You can stream it in more than a dozen languages including Cantonese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese, but not French. But maybe someday Disney will update the French lyrics to Let It Go, and offer French as an option to watch Frozen on Disney+
[CORNU] They regularly, even with the older films like Snow White they redo the dubbing at regular stages. I think there are at least, there are at least three different dubbed versions for Snow White. The original Snow White.
Meanwhile, subtitles are becoming more and more fashionable in France.
[BEN HADJ] I think subtitles are going to take over slowly but surely.
She says in the last ten years there’s been a big shift. Subtitles used to be mainly in random art houses, but there are now several movies shown in English with French subtitles in large movie theaters, and the rooms are packed.
[BEN HADJ] In the time that we live in today with all the social media… You have this younger generation who’s very interested in speaking English and being able to communicate with everybody. So watching content in English is a good way for them to improve.
She also thinks the quality of the dubbing has dropped in the last twenty years. Or at least, doesn’t hold up to the way she saw dubbed movies when she was growing up. Although she acknowledges that dubbing will remain necessary for children’s content, she is not sure that it will stick around for long. Jean Francois Cornu agrees that there is a rising interest in subtitles. He attributes it in part to younger people not wanting to wait for French dubbed versions to become available. A subtitled version of a movie can be done in a week versus the two months it takes for the dubbed version. There’s also an audience that grew up on home-made subtitled versions of pirated content.
[CORNU] There’s a growing demand for subtitled series, which is why the major platforms like Netflix or Disney or Amazon have favored subtitles versions. Also because it’s quicker and supposedly cheaper to do than dubbing. But, the very interesting point and shift in that is that for the French market at least, Netflix is giving a lot of attention to dubbing. To the point of having opened a specific dubbing studio in France in Paris. Hiring major people who are references in the dubbing industry, so that they would do properly dubbed versions of their series.
If Netflix is betting big on dubbed versions in the French market, chances are the demand for dubbing is not going to drop off a cliff tomorrow. Oh, and when it comes to whether people should watch Squid Game with subtitles?
[CORNU] The thing about Squid Game is that the subtitled versions were terribly bad in French, in English, in German, in practically all the languages that it was subtitled in. And we as professional translators – especially, I’m a member of a professional organization – we raised the issue publicly, especially on social networks. We are in regular talks with the Netflix people in charge of foreign languages and they are aware that they should change the way they do things.
So, if you’re watching something foreign, and some of the dialogue doesn’t hit quite right... Pay attention to see if maybe that line is being used to set something up that’ll pay off later. Because it takes a whole cast to make sure that you can understand movies and TV shows from overseas, and people are sweating the small stuff to give viewers the best possible experience.
And I leave you with this fun fact: Benoit Allemane was also the French voice of James Earl Jones. He first dubbed him in Gardens of Stones.
My name is Gauthier Giacomoni. I reported, wrote, and produced this episode with music by the Always Hot Eben Lillie, and my actual brother Aldric Giacomoni. Special thanks to David Shapiro for lending his all-American voice to Benoit Allemane, and thank you for listening.