“A splendid innovation, these English titles!”. The early days of subtitling in Britain and the United States

The transition from silent to sound film, as is well known, caused radical changes in the way that motion pictures circulated between countries and languages. In the silent period, intertitles could easily and cheaply be edited out of film prints, re-shot in the target language(s) and reinserted into the film print. With the coming of sound, intertitles disappeared and solutions had to be found for the translation of spoken dialogue, and to a lesser extent invision written text, in the source language. There has been a lot of research interest in recent years in the brief period of multilingual production (roughly 19291932), during which studios such as Para mount and Ufa shot films simultaneously in two or more languages. However, as scholars including Markus Nornes have observed, there has been much less interest in the beginnings of subtitling and dubbing techno logy, which gained ground as it was realized that multilingual production was expensive and its product not necessarily what audiences wanted. This paper responds to this gap in research by looking at the transitional period between the arrival of sound in 1927 and the arrival of subtitling in English. Subtitling of Hollywood product in other territories was well underway from 1929, but it was not until the early 1930s that films were subtitled into English in the US and the UK. The paper will look at these subtitled films, and their context of circulation, from both a textual and a contextual perspective. The textual perspective is based largely on archival research on the film prints of the period. Films examined include Pabst’s Westfront 1918, Pabst’s Kameradschaft and Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform. I will consider issues such as the layout and look of the early subtitles; the choices about which elements of the dialogue should be titled, and the transitional practices that blurred the boundaries between intertitling and subtitling. The paper will also consider contexts of film distribution and exhibition, including the work of key agents such as film critics, cinema owners and the first subtitlers. How did distributors, exhibitors and audiences negotiate the period, only a few years long, when sound films were distributed in the UK and the US without what we would now consider to be translation? One answer is that filmmakers such as René Clair were experimenting with filmmaking techniques that subordinated spoken language to other elements of the audiovisual text, including music and pantomime. Another answer is that audiences for non-English language film included a large proportion of native spea kers of the source language; this seems to have been the case particularly in the United States. There are also, however, sustained attempts by reviewers and distributors to evaluate the extent to which audiences would be likely to enjoy films shot in a language not theirs. My research draws on press reviews and on archival records, including exhibitor ephemera and distributor catalogues, to look at the way foreign language film was ‘sold’, untranslated, to English-speaking audiences. It uses similar resources to evaluate audience responses to the first subtitled films. I will conclude by considering what the implications are of my research findings for the study of film history and of translation history.