Movie Translator

Ruth Shek-Yasur subtitles English-, French-, and German-language movies into Hebrew, and, less often, Hebrew-, French- and German-language movies into English. An emotional person, she spends much of the day doing work as precise as an accountant's at a computer like a tombstone.

When the words aren't coming right, she pushes back from the machine and unwinds by dancing about her fifth-floor Tel Aviv apartment, sweeping the terrace, washing dishes, watering plants, making tea, or feeding her cats and making sure neither has fallen into the toilet whose seat they use to jump onto the windowsill and then up to the roof.

"You should see them get down from the roof," she says. "They cling by their claws to the shingle and drop inwards to the sill, twisting in mid-air. It makes me perfectly dizzy.

"Well, what can I tell you? Here's a script I'm going to do."

She turns several pages of a mimeographed script with sections of dialogue bracketed in red pencil.

"It's already 'spotted,'" she says. "The dialogue in each of those marks goes into a subtitle. As well as it can!

"Not infrequently the speeches have been cut or changed in the final print we get here. Before I work on a film I have to screen it, often more than once, to check that the dialogue list corresponds to what the audience will see.

"Also, there's a special problem with Hebrew because I must know who is being addressed in every speech to get the verb form right."

Ruth is a vibrant woman of 41, with an expressive face and thick dark hair into which she frequently thrusts her hands.

"First rule: you can't use all the words they say in the film. The eye reads slower than the ear hears. There's not enough time to write out all the words spoken; you must condense. Sometimes you have to let whole sentences go -- sometimes a joke, because it would take too long to tell and distract from the main path of the story.

"Then too, there's the size of the screen to take into account. A movie subtitle has lines of no more than 38 characters, including punctuation and spaces. A TV subtitle has 27 characters, because the screen is smaller. You have to get what is said in that patch of film into that subtitle; otherwise, the audience will be behind where the movie means them to be. And you'll have trouble catching up, because you need the following spots for whatever's said there. It's a bit of a challenge. I used to find myself counting letters like a crossword puzzle. Now the computer tells me when I'm taking too many spaces.

"Rule two: you generally can't translate word for word, because it would confuse the audience. The characters are making references to things in their culture the audience doesn't know about or they are talking slang. Slang is very difficult.

"Slang's lovely. I adore it. It is always acceptable when spoken because it's spoken to people who understand it. But slang in a foreign language seldom makes sense translated literally, word for word.

"Furthermore, slang is time-bound. There's twenties' slang and thirties' slang -- who says 'Yes, we have no bananas' today? If you translate using slang that belongs to an earlier generation, you make the characters sound weird.

"You can do the same thing if you use slang that comes from a specific subculture. Here in Israel I can draw from Yiddish slang, Russian slang, Arabic slang, as well as Hebrew. Well, if I do so, am I going to mislead the audience?

"Rule three: what matters is the point of the words, not the words themselves. The spirit and tone of the conversation. The social class of the people speaking.

"The object is to serve what's happening on the screen, so the audience will always know the plot, what really counts. Basically, movies use dialogue to say things that can't be shown. It's your responsibility to get those things across to the audience if they have to know them to understand the film; if you can get more than this across -- and you can, you always can -- so much the better."

Asked which movies are most difficult to subtitle, Ruth says, "Comedies! Movies with specific jargon, like Top Gun or baseball movies. When I do a baseball movie I spend half my time on the phone to local fanatics who know the Hebrew words for sinker ball and I don't know what -- Texas Leaguer!

"Well-written movies are easier to work on, even if the language is difficult. Because the movie hangs together. I just did The Lady Eve, which was tough because everyone talks on top of one another. But it was such fun and had so much energy that you couldn't go wrong keeping to the story.

"Bergman is easy to translate. You can speak elliptically in all languages. And he's full of . . . significant . . . pauses," Ruth laughs and bats her eyes.

"Hitchcock is generally easy because there's not much talk -- he's into showing.

"What I type in my computer is copied directly onto the film print. That's why I get ulcers. I'm the first draft, the editor, and the publisher.

"I learned all my languages before I was eight. I was born in Czechoslovakia, where my parents came from. Immediately I was brought to Israel, where I spent my first four years, so I learned to speak Hebrew. My father was in the diplomatic service, and from age four to eight I spent in London; my first schooling was in English. Then from age eight to twelve, we were in Paris. Every summer from age four to eleven I spent with my brother and sister on my great-grandmother's farm in Austria -- another language: German.

"Father didn't want us speaking German for reasons you can imagine. He told our grandmother not to speak it to us, but Great-grandmother didn't speak anything else. Besides, that was what the neighboring kids spoke. We'd forget it every winter and pick it up next summer.

"A diplomatic life is very hard on children -- very dysfunctional, though we didn't have the word then. You keep being torn away from everything you know, and your parents are out every night doing their job. It's hard on the wife, too: she is left holding the house together in a foreign country while her husband does the interesting work.

"A small child realizes very fast that it may not be worth it to put herself into making new friends because she'll soon be gone.

"Languages can a problem. Often the servants spoke another language: Spanish or Portuguese. 'There are too many languages in this house!' my brother said when he was three or four. It became a catch phrase in the family. He is now a diplomat in Paris.

"I learned the languages, but I missed all the explanations of how they work. I know no grammar at all. I go by my gut. All I know is when something sounds right.

"From age 16 to 19 I was in Vienna -- German was no long verboten. I didn't know where on earth I belonged. I remember at 17 driving through Paris in a convertible, with the wind gushing through my hair, smoking, talking philosophy, and wondering, 'Who is this girl?'

"Well, at 18 all Israeli women have to begin two years of military service. According to law, I could have my service postponed until Father was posted back to Israel. In fact, I did get a six-month postponement.

"Then I did something smart. I stopped asking myself 'who am I?' because I got too many answers. Instead, I asked, 'Who do I want to be? Where do I want to make my life? What language do I want to speak?' These were probably the first adult questions I had asked.

"I went to my father and said, 'I want to get myself in synch with my society. This is my one chance. I'm going back and enter the army.'

"My father was a clever guy. He said, 'You're doing useful things here, but . . .' And he smiled and shrugged and gave me a hug.

"Even in Israel I was an outsider. I was much more adult than the other recruits. I had met all kinds of interesting and important people. Further, I was so shy that I was a great snob. But I had a goal in mind, and I was exactly right.

"Our army takes people from every background. Everyone's an outsider when they join. I was scared stiff. I was alone, following an intuition I'd had.

"And I got just what I wanted: I was treated like nothing special, like everybody else. I became like everybody else. I became what the army wanted me to be. I wound up working with journalists -- my languages again -- but as a cog in the organization. I was home.

"After the army, I went to design school for three years. I came out and designed all sorts of things -- leisure wear, lingerie, women's outer wear, children's wear, even men's wear. Always, though, I felt a tug toward words, those languages I had up in the attic." She ruffles her hair.

"My husband was translating movies, and one day he needed my help with the French. That was it!"

Stewart Granger

Scaramouche (1952) keeps popping up on cable channels. I mean to see it again. It’s the first movie I liked enough to see twice. A friend and I, both 11, went to see another movie at the Pix Theater in White Plains, New York, and the other movie wasn’t playing; Scaramouche was. “I’ve seen it,” I said. The ticket lady said she’d let us in for free, because of the mistaken newspaper ad, which made my choice easy.

Scaramouche is lots of fun and sword fighting. I get it mixed up with King Solomon’s Mines (1950), another movie starring Stewart Granger. There’s a scene in one of the pictures where the hero, the girl, and you are in an underground river in a cave, and you have to swim under the rock roof, not knowing how far the roof runs, not knowing if it lets you come up for air before you drown. But you have to chance it because there’s death coming up behind you. When I read about Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, I knew what he meant, only for me it was a dive.

I think of the girl as Rhonda Fleming, who turns out not to be in either movie. I see her arching her head back to let fall her cascade of fiery hair, which is brilliantly clean and untangled despite her having been underwater, in the jungle, and on horseback riding through the woods. Needless to say, she is less a protagonist in the action than the prize the hero takes along to enjoy when the battle’s won.

Stewart Granger, I see now, I’ve undersold. I had thought that, like all suburban boys of the 1950s, I took my selves from rebellious Marlon Brando and James Dean. But no. There’s a lot in me of the Henry Fonda of Twelve Angry Men (1957) and Gregory Peck of To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962)—the quiet fellow in glasses who can be counted on to do his duty. But I realize I was on my way to becoming that fellow before either of those movies, thanks to unflappable Stewart Granger, who, I just now found out, hated playing the upright hero and was married for a decade (1950-60) to the sexiest and most infuriating girl in all cinema, Jean Simmons of Great Expectations (1946). “I don’t know which I chose worse,” Granger was to remark late in life, “my roles or my wives.” Say it ain’t so, Stew; your roles were ideal.

World War II in St. Louis

No doubt the saddest song of World War II is Kim Gannon, Walter Kent, and Buck Ram’s 1943 “I’ll Be Home for Christmas (If Only in My Dreams).” For years it was banned from Armed Forces Radio as defeatist.

A song I find even more moving, and certainly better, is Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), the upbeat Vincente Minnelli movie about the life a comfortable St. Louis family, the Alonzo Smiths, in the year of the 1904 World's Fair. Meet Me in St. Louis offers itself as a pure piece of Americana, right down to the Currier and Ivesesque sampler pictures of the four seasons before each of the movie’s four segments. Nonetheless, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is, I suggest, a war song and told WWII audiences how to deal with the circumstances they faced.

Judy Garland sings the song to her sister, six-year-old Margaret O'Brien, who is hysterical because their father, Leon Ames, has told them that the Smith family is moving from St. Louis to New York City so he can get ahead in his company. Garland tries to comfort O’Brien, saying they will soon love New York and have just the sort of joyous Christmases they’ve had in St. Louis. For now, she sings, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas. . . . Some day all your problems will be far away.” Her closing verse:

One day soon we all may be together,
If the fates allow.
Until then we'll try to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Not too cheery that! We “may” be together, “if the fates allow.” Garland isn’t talking here of the Smith family’s changing cities, but of people being reunited, God willing, after a cataclysm like war. And how are the Smiths to get through the bad present time to the—God willing—better future? The expression Garland uses is a Britishism and an anachronistic, "muddle through," a phrase the English poet Louis MacNeice popularized in 1940 to describe the blundering, inexorable way the British were going to win the war.

"Muddle through," though not a phrase we Americans used much, was the way we thought of the British coping with war and the way we were encouraged to deal with the war ourselves: hanging on, hanging tough, pushing slowly ahead, having a merry little Christmas till it was over over there and Johnny came marching home again to sit with us under the apple tree.