English speaking Totoro?
Tags: Dubbed Hollywood Movies, Popular Culture, Totoro, Translation, Japanese

Before TV and all the viewing innovations that have come since then, it was neighborhood movie theaters where people gathered to gaze at the flickering images, originally silent movies with some accompaniment from a live pianist, for instance. The online crowd participation project of documenting selected natural features and cultural history of towns and rural areas, called “Wikishootme!” (Wiki Shoot Me) includes many locations labeled “former movie theater.” In big cities the theaters seem to be spaced every mile or so, with a few instances close together in a sort of movie house district. Today in those locations there are parking lots, derelict structures, as well as active businesses. One or two continue to serve as sites of local theater productions, comedy nights, and even movie screening of film (not digital) titles. The Wealthy Street Theater in Grand Rapids, Michigan hosts movie nights along with local theater and comedy thanks to efforts in its surrounding neighborhood to rally around the business to support and promote it.

Movie screen with coming attractions at Wealthy Street Theater 11/2019 in Grand Rapids, Michigan (author pic)

The 1988 animated classic, My Neighbor Tottoro (Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki; Tonari no Totoro, となりのトトロ) began a little after 8 p.m. with Hisaishi Joe’s music and the credits in Japanese, a few of the most prominent ones given with English language subtitles. So I was prepared for the original Japanese soundtrack and subtitles. This would be chance to dust off my infrequently used Japanese language skills. But then the theme song broke in, dubbed into English lyrics, a bit clunky by having to cut the syllables to fit the musical phrases meant for Japanese. I was curious to see how well the swap of English for the creator’s Japanese would come off.

Not being a serious movie critic of dubbing and subtitlers’ arts, but with training in documentary and cultural anthropology of Japan, I looked carefully at the net effect of the Big Screen experience. My reactions were various: much more of the music nuance and detail came through, compared to watching on a small screen. So did the care and small visual features packed into the animator’s canvas. But yet, compared to previous viewings in Japanese, something was missing in general.

Now in very skillfully dubbed (American) English voices, the story seemed so casually Euro-American that very little of the Japanese roots seemed to come across. Overtones, texture, flavor, rhythm of English was overwriting the Japanese in the dubbing process. Maybe an analogy would be having plates of sushi wedged into a vast traditional Thanksgiving dinner — sort of reduced to an incidental experience or curious afterthought rather than a starring role. Of course the reverse cultural process also happens all the time: taking English language films and dubbing to local languages and cultures, thus “domesticating” the English foreignness to the tastes of local audiences.

On a more subtle scale, imagine dubbing the voicing differences between and among the several English-origin countries. For example, how would it be to put an Australian production into the voices of Kiwis. Or Irish dialogue swapped for British; or perhaps Canadian for USA talking. Taking it even further, imagine regional accents like the boroughs of NYC dubbed to Midwestern, or Bronx to Piedmont southern, Brooklyn to west Texan or to Cascadia (NW USA), for instance. While the visual channel and plot development is unchanged, and the mouths probably move in sync when accents are swapped (occasionally altering a regional term like ‘pop’ for ‘soda’ in the example of carbonated soft drinks), the “feeling” of the audience experience is altogether altered.

Does the flavor of local accents matter to the actor’s character and identity for the audience? Does the dubbing language (instead of subtitling the original production language) have consequences for the viewers’ grasp of the meanings in play? Yes, accent matters as much as diction, actor to actor pacing and volume and “tone of voice” (attitude). A factoid from a 1980s college class on the methods for teaching E.S.L. (English as a Second or foreign Language; ESL, EFL) is that the amount of meaning being communicated can be roughly estimated: from the context (50%), from the tone of voice (35%), and from the vocabulary or precise selection of words and correct syntax (15%). In other words for movie dubbing, the visual channel does not change (context itself is not affected, but audience worldview among one set of language speakers imputes different meanings to the context clues), but the tone of voice and the word use (as well as the voice actor’s personal voice qualities — either consonant to the original actor or differing in some ways in pitch and texture/timbre). Thus at least half the original language meaning is lost when a new language overwrites the original one.

To the second question, does dubbing language impose meanings onto the original meanings and themes of the story, the answer there also is yes, it matters. Linguists say that all languages carry two layers, theme (what your message information or data is) and rheme (the judgement you yourself layer onto that message, either approving or disapproving of the matter, for instance). The dubbing process aims to make the resulting voices seem colloquial, natural to the audience historical moment and their easily understood feelings. Translation scholars sometimes call this principle “dynamic equivalence” (being loose with the precise meaning in order to reach the larger goal of audience emotional effects so as to mirror the original language and audience experience). The reverse kind of translation is formal or literal and is intended to make the foreign structures and meanings approachable while always demonstrating to the reader or viewer that this version is bumpy and sometimes strange. The rendering is meant to give some hint of the meaning to the non-native language speaker without simply turning the original language into the audience habits, expectations, and assumptions. That clunky way to convey the dialog and narration forces the audience to work at figuring out the meaning, rather than giving it away freely; effortlessly. In sum, whether dubbing from British to American English, or in the case of Totoro, going from Japanese to (American) English, there is a lot more than word meaning that passes from screen to audience. When Japanese viewers see Totoro in Japanese the many cultural assumptions, aspirations, and nostalgia cues are communicated from the visual context, as well as from the particular (perhaps antiquated or regional) words and accents and tone of voice in the characters’ voice actors. What the audience of English viewers gets from the English dubbed Totoro is the same visual beauty, but without the Japanese resonance of memory and recognition. There are not cultural footnotes supplied to non-Japanese viewers. And there is no need for those explanations to Japanese viewers themselves.

Not only does the change in voicing jettison all the unspoken cultural meanings and context clues, but the non-native (English) audience brings along its own habits of thinking when hearing the dubbed English dialog: things like relationships can be read into the voice actor’s tone of voice, as well as emotional responses (maybe mostly universal in stimulus, but sometimes significantly different in response or manner of showing reactions). Translation scholars talk about “surplus meaning” for the things that the foreign audience brings to their engagement with the dubbed dialog. “Deficit meaning” is the part of the source language that is lost in translation; simply discarded to make the task more streamlined.

When learning your native language, as well as when considering the stages in learning a 2nd or 3rd language, people have said that the highest level involves five areas of meaning to master — both to express these things well, but also to perceive or appreciate these things well. The five arenas of meaning are Emotion, Persuasiveness (e.g. Politics, called “the art of the possible”), Religiosity, Humor, and Literary Arts (poetry, speech making, storytelling). Looking at this instance of Totoro expertly turned into English, several of these highest dimensions of meaning are involved in the screenplay: humor (teasing between the sisters & laughing to force the Soot Sprites out of the haunted rental house), emotion (happy to sad, fearful, awed, determined moments), literary arts (poetic comments, pathos of the ill mother and sad family), and religious experience (the forest gods, camphor tree kami, as well as references to the roadside protectors, Ojizo-sama). Since these highest levels of language are baked into the screenplay in Japanese they rest on the deepest levels history, culture, social relations, and connections to the land. Such things have deep and wide roots and cannot expeditiously or facilely be transplanted to the English ground of meaning.

The resulting experience of seeing Totoro dubbed into English was mixed after having earlier experiences seeing it on a small screen in Japanese. The sensory engagement of full sound and big visual dimension was enriching. And the limitations of my Japanese meant that some new parts of the dialog revealed in English became crystal clear (on the cultural assumptions of English points of reference, though). But the overarching feeling was that something was missing in the dubbing process: sort of like the bass clef on the orchestral score being absent. There was plenty of enjoyable music, but yet something was gone.

At the level of owner’s manual or a numbered list of instructions, perhaps machine translation is acceptable. But for sophisticated storytelling and translations of books, perhaps there should be an obligatory warning label, like the ones on tobacco products about health dangers. For dubbed movies or translated books, it is not a matter of immediate health risk but it is the unfortunate loss of meaning (and substitution of surplus, foreign meanings) that is of concern. Just because you have read or seen the story (not in the original language) does not mean that you have fully embraced the significance of what the author wants to say; the plot and conclusions, yes, but the full flavor and weight of issues at play, probably not.