The delights of dubbing and other language issues.

Zapping (Spanish channel hopping) the other day, I suddenly found myself watching “The Magnificent Seven” in gallego. This is a film inspired by Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese “Seven Samurai” turned into a spaghetti western by John Sturges in 1960, probably filmed in Spain and involving at one point strange ritual dances from Mexican indian culture. It was already such a wonderful cultural hotchpotch that it’s strange to think of anyone going to the trouble of dubbing it into gallego. I suppose it must provide work for frustrated Galician actors but it was certainly odd to see familiar faces such as Yul Bryner and Steve McQueen spouting words in gallego. On reflection though, I’m just surprised they didn’t dub the sound track as well to include some gaita music.

Everyone here, of course, just takes dubbing of films and television series for granted. I keep seeing trailers for familiar films with slightly odd titles, such as recently when I came across “El Ultimatum de Bourne”. There are hordes of people who admire actors like George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt and so on who have never actually heard their voices. Parallel to that there are a lot of actors who must regularly provide the voices of these well-known faces and get little credit for it. If they dub into Spanish (castellano) then I suppose it’s logical that they also dub into gallego, catalán and vasco.

I have just finished reading “A Woman Unknown” by Lucia Graves, daughter of the poet Robert Graves. She writes about her childhood, growing up not just bilingual but trilingual on the island of Mallorca. Her father had lived there before the Spanish Civil War and returned there in 1946, taking his family with him, Lucia then being a small girl. So she spoke Spanish at home, Catalán with her friends and Spanish (castellano) at school. This was of course Franco’s Spain where the regional languages were banned and everyone had to speak Spanish in school, at work and in public places. It is interesting to read her descriptions of the persistent brainwashing that went on in the schools and how it was only as she began to grow up that she realised that some of the people she was fond of and respected were in fact the dreaded “reds” she was warned about at school.

Like many people educated in the language of their parents’ adopted country Lucia found that she had some difficulties with literacy in that parental tongue. When she was sent off to an international school in Switzerland she was ashamed to find she had to have several goes before passing O-Level English. It is, however, a very common thing. I have known a number of bilingual students who could read and speak French, Spanish, German or whatever very fluently but had great difficulty writing it simply because of lack of practice.

She overcame the problems however and went on to study languages at the University of Oxford. As she described a translation class working on a passage from a novel by the Spanish writer Galdós I found another example of the problems of growing up outside your “native” country. She explained that the verb “varear”, one way of saying to measure, has connections with “la vara”, the rod or measuring stick used to measure cloth sold by the yard or metre, speaking as though this was a purely Spanish thing. And yet I remember the yardstick being used in just that way in England. Growing up elsewhere, Lucia lacked that bit of English culture. A small thing, but interesting to me.

On the reading front, I finally laid my hands on an illicit copy of the book being read by the Club de Lectura Frances, of which I am not officially a member because I belong to the Club de Lectura Castellano/Gallego, both of these at the local municipal library. However, I have not been able to read it. A crisis has sprung up at home in the UK and I need to fly off. So, not wanting to cause problems for the club coordinator who lent me the book, I tried to leave it at reception in the library to be returned to her. No go! The bulldog/terrier/rottweiler at reception insisted I had to “return” it properly in the main section of the library. They would then return it to her so she could put it in the cupboard. So now I need to email Maribel, the coordinator, and explain it all to her.

While in the library I tried to glean a little more information about the possible Club de Lectura Italiano. All I got from the bulldog/terrier/rottweiler at reception was a growled “Ya no empezó” – It’s not started yet!!!! She started to tell me they were taking names for the club but then looked at me and snarled, “Ah, pero tú no puedes inscribirte” – Ah, but you can’t sign up! She may be the bulldog/terrier/rottweiler at reception but she has the memory of an elephant and knows I already belong to a club de lectura. End of story Once again Library Rules, OK!