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ABSTRACT
Research on audiovisual translation (AVT) has so far been basically restricted to the European context, almost completely ignoring the Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. Furthermore, the background and factors that influenced the emergence and development of audiovisual translation modes in Spanish America have not been studied either thus far. The present article shows a review of the historical, social, political, technical and professional aspects that have shaped audiovisual translation in Venezuela, a key country in the evolution of AVT in Spanish America, and the influence of the so-called ‘neutral Spanish’. The research is based, in part, on the nuclear testimonies of some of the main translators, revisers and managers of AVT in Venezuela.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Adrián Fuentes-Luque is Associate Professor in Translation at Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain), where he was the director of the master’s degree in translation and the head of the translation and interpreting section. His main fields of interest include audiovisual translation, history of translation, tourism translation, translation of humour and advertising translation. He can be reached at [email protected]
Notes
1 The main objections made to this momentous cinematic innovation were the following: it was said that the synchronisation of voice with gesture, mainly from the lips, was impossible to achieve. However, the reality is very different. The actors move their lips and gesture simultaneously with the sound of the voice. There are moments when one gets the clear impression that the film was filmed in Spanish, but the phonetic differences between the two languages reveal here and there the only flaw of the new technique: a puckering of the lips or a flash of the teeth that does not match the words heard. But in spite of these small details, which are more noticeable during the ‘close ups’, everything is easily forgotten in favour of the interest of the plot and only a vivid satisfaction seems to remain when capturing in one's own language all the nuances of the dialogue, which before was compressed and insipid in the uncomfortable Spanish subtitles. (My translation).
2 None of the [dubbed movies] I've seen here have been perfect. They all lack the details of synchronisation (…). I think this difficulty could be overcome by hiring Spanish actors. It would be easy, counting on the many of us who are in Latin America today. But it seems that there are great difficulties in getting Spanish actors into Hollywood. On the other hand, Metro, in Barcelona, where I worked, and precisely in the technical dubbing service, had reached extraordinary perfection. I don't understand how these experiences have not been used. (My translation).
3 Films dubbed in Spanish are like that, a crude mystification of art. And it is a very serious attack when the voices and pronunciation of those who say the translated dialogues not only do not correspond to the gestures of the English dialogue but, in addition, they are voices and pronunciation of people who speak badly and unpleasantly Spanish. (My translation).
4 The Quadruplex, also known as ‘2-inch machines’, were the first video recording machines on magnetic tape, invented by Ampex in 1956. They took up an entire room and were noisy and very expensive to maintain and repair, but they replaced cinema film projected on kinescopes as the only system for television that was not live. By 1975, when ‘Etcétera’ was born, Venezuela's channels had already switched to helical formats such as Sony's U/Matic, but Brazil's Rede Globo, one of the world's largest television networks, still valued its old 2-inch machines very highly and ‘Etcétera’ bought two so that it could provide dubbing services for Brazilian soap operas.
5 In the guild, it is said that Mario Abate, the personal photographer of Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez, apparently managed to ingratiate himself with the latter and the highest echelons of society in order to obtain contacts and funding.
6 SoftNI's founder created a set of standards for the preparation and transmission of subtitles, and in 1986 the company developed the first PC-based subtitling system. In addition to being a pioneer in this area, this subtitling programme incorporated several technical innovations that made it more attractive to translators and production companies: ease of use, possibility of inserting time codes, smoothing of letter borders (especially in old movies with ‘snow’ in the picture), inclusion of a spell checker and control of parameters such as character count per line, which up to that point was done by eye.
7 The Quantafont was (and still is) a character generator machine made to receive analog video, overlay characters and output that video with the overlay characters, made specifically for subtitling. Before it, the only character generator machine and small graphic images for television channels was the Chyron, an expensive machine that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Chyron was the first to generate characters for the lower thirds of television screens, used primarily for sports programmes. Its use was so important that the word Chyron is still used in many channels as a generic of the texts and images that go in the lower thirds of the screens and it is very common in the television channels all over the world to hear a director ask for ‘a chyron’ about this or that thing meaning an inferior text on the subject. The cost of a chyron generator was such that no one would think of using one just for subtitling. At that time subtitled movies already came with subtitles on the image, either by the method invented by Titra of France or by Bipack or ‘American band’, as it was known in Venezuela. In the 1980s, Quantafont came up with the idea of bringing out a character generator just for subtitling that cost something like the meager sum of $25,000 and generated very recognisable half-square characters on the first Betamax video machines.
8 See also note above. Chyron, took out a generator that occupied only two shelves called VP1 that cost about $6,000 and that Video Express decided to modify a little bit to serve as a subtitler and avoid buying a Quantafont that cost four times as much. Daniel Glodschlager said: ‘The VP1 was not designed for that and it did not generate typefaces with eñs or accents, so we convinced a Chyron engineer to burn a typeface chip in extended ascii code, and with the addition of some components we made it work as a subtitler. As a curious detail, several colleagues from Home Video looked for excuses to visit us in our studio to see what equipment we were subtitling with, so we erased Chyron’s logo from the machine and invented a non-existent brand that we stuck on it so that we wouldn’t have to deny access to the studio to friends who visited us’.
9 SoftNI, in addition to being a subtitling programme, has also been widely used as a title editing programme in the television broadcasts of numerous channels, such as HBO.
10 Spanish is a country that allows you to move through an unlimited variety of landscapes without being stopped at any border, a fluid and flexible identity that allows us to be both from many places and from one only (My translation).