Gulliver's Travels to Russia
Published: 12 January, 2011, 18:27
Edited: 20 January, 2011, 17:19
Edited: 20 January, 2011, 17:19
Now that my non-disclosure agreement has expired, I can finally talk… and I just have to make a confession about how my comrade Andrey Petrov and I were called up by Twentieth Century Fox CIS to supervise the Russian dubbing of “Gulliver’s Travels”, starring none other than Jack Black
.
The flick is loosely based on Jonathan Swift’s ingenious satire of the same name, with plenty of modern cultural references and a vast amount of product placement.
Jack Black as Gulliver If you are American, English or Aussie you watch the movies in original, as most of them are filmed in the language that you speak. But we Russians speak another language, and aren’t at all used to reading subtitles, so we have a huge dubbing industry with plenty of specialized studious working in Moscow and St. Pete.
Some times they do an amazing job (for example, I just love the Russian version of “Fight Club”, in which you can’t hear Ed Norton outdoing Brad Pitt), but sometimes they fail. Especially when it comes to comedy.
This is because dubbing is a complicated process, which has a lot in common with the game Chinese Whispers, or Broken Telephone, you used to play when you were a kid.
This is how it works. The Hollywood studios send original Dialogue Lists to be translated into Russian. By the way, those documents are really fun to read, as they include comments explaining all the jokes and cultural references within in the movie in order to aid the interpreter. Here’s a small quote for you:
“GULLIVER AS DARTH VADER
- Give me your press badge.
GULLIVER AS LUKE SKYWALKER
- No way, you're not my dad!
(No way = colloquial dismissal)
(You're…dad = colloquial expression indicating to someone that they have no authority; note humor, in the Star Wars trilogy, it is revealed that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father).”
After the Russian literary translation is done, it goes to a special employee, who’s described by a term more often used in logistics – a stacker. His job is to rephrase the text so that the Russian words will fit into the lips of the English-speaking actors.
And then the final changes to the dialogues are usually done during the dubbing itself. So you can easily imagine how much is being lost during all those metamorphoses. Because the translation may be accurate and correct, but many phrases just start missing that spark which made them so hilarious in the original.
Our task was to keep this spark in place. In order to do so, we carefully edited the translation of the Dialogue List and were there at the studio to witness the actors at work.
And (I have to confess) taking part in dubbing is the most unusual way to watch a movie one can possibly imagine!
The actors got into the sound booth one after another and record their parts from the first to the last line. So you never get a chance to see the whole movie, but rather assemble it like a puzzle inside your head.
It took us a week to deal with “Gulliver’s Travels”, which above all included three six-hour-long shifts for the man in the lead and the arrival of a chorus to sing the cover of Edwin Starr’s “War (What is it good for?)” for the final scene.
Chris O’Dowd as EdwardBut the No. 1 highlight was working on the part of Gulliver’s tiny, but dangerous nemesis General Edward Edwardian by Chris O’Dowd. The star of “The IT Crowd” steals the show completely in “Gulliver’s Travels”, endowing his character with both mental disorder and his branded Irish accent.
And it was impressive to watch how one of the dubbing gurus – Aleksandr Gruzdev – coped with the difficult task of assuring that Edward wouldn’t lose any of his wicked charm in the Russian version.
Aleksandr GruzdevThe dubbing actors as a whole are quite a special caste. They rarely get big roles in film or theater; they aren’t recognized by fans in the streets, but all the moviegoers in the country know their – beautiful – voices, as they are associated with the stars they usually speak for.
A few days ago we came back from our New Year holidays and went to the cinema to finally see the overall result we achieved. And (without false modesty) I have to say that we did pretty well, as there were a few lines in “Gulliver’s Travels” which made the audience laughed out loud, and those were the jokes to which we paid our maximum attention.
The flick is loosely based on Jonathan Swift’s ingenious satire of the same name, with plenty of modern cultural references and a vast amount of product placement.
Jack Black as Gulliver
Some times they do an amazing job (for example, I just love the Russian version of “Fight Club”, in which you can’t hear Ed Norton outdoing Brad Pitt), but sometimes they fail. Especially when it comes to comedy.
This is because dubbing is a complicated process, which has a lot in common with the game Chinese Whispers, or Broken Telephone, you used to play when you were a kid.
This is how it works. The Hollywood studios send original Dialogue Lists to be translated into Russian. By the way, those documents are really fun to read, as they include comments explaining all the jokes and cultural references within in the movie in order to aid the interpreter. Here’s a small quote for you:
“GULLIVER AS DARTH VADER
- Give me your press badge.
GULLIVER AS LUKE SKYWALKER
- No way, you're not my dad!
(No way = colloquial dismissal)
(You're…dad = colloquial expression indicating to someone that they have no authority; note humor, in the Star Wars trilogy, it is revealed that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father).”
After the Russian literary translation is done, it goes to a special employee, who’s described by a term more often used in logistics – a stacker. His job is to rephrase the text so that the Russian words will fit into the lips of the English-speaking actors.
And then the final changes to the dialogues are usually done during the dubbing itself. So you can easily imagine how much is being lost during all those metamorphoses. Because the translation may be accurate and correct, but many phrases just start missing that spark which made them so hilarious in the original.
And (I have to confess) taking part in dubbing is the most unusual way to watch a movie one can possibly imagine!
The actors got into the sound booth one after another and record their parts from the first to the last line. So you never get a chance to see the whole movie, but rather assemble it like a puzzle inside your head.
It took us a week to deal with “Gulliver’s Travels”, which above all included three six-hour-long shifts for the man in the lead and the arrival of a chorus to sing the cover of Edwin Starr’s “War (What is it good for?)” for the final scene.
Chris O’Dowd as Edward
And it was impressive to watch how one of the dubbing gurus – Aleksandr Gruzdev – coped with the difficult task of assuring that Edward wouldn’t lose any of his wicked charm in the Russian version.
Aleksandr Gruzdev
A few days ago we came back from our New Year holidays and went to the cinema to finally see the overall result we achieved. And (without false modesty) I have to say that we did pretty well, as there were a few lines in “Gulliver’s Travels” which made the audience laughed out loud, and those were the jokes to which we paid our maximum attention.
