Global English Ideography and the Dissolve Translation in Hollywood Film R. John Williams (bio) The appearance of three Chinese actresses as Japanese geishas in Sony Pictures’ 2005 adaptation Memoirs of a Geisha injected new blood into an ongoing debate on the tense relationship between theatrical “representation” and racial or cultural “identity.” Some reviewers argued that there was something jarringly strange, even politically incorrect, about coaching Chinese actresses to speak English with a Japanese accent. Others argued that the casting decisions were not discriminatory, but merely reflected the box office star power of the Chinese actresses Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh who, even in Japan, are a stronger draw for audiences than any contemporary Japanese actresses. In the midst of this debate, however, no one thought to ask the more obvious question: why English in the first place? Is Japanese-accented English merely intended here to signal an act of translation? Or is the real scandal (to twist a phrase from Lawrence Venuti) a lack of translation, an effort to “represent” or “stand in” for translation—to cause us to temporarily forget that one ever needs translation?1 Is there a connection, perhaps, between asking why English in the first place and why English, among other languages, seems always to be in “first place”? These are, of course, the same questions one could ask of any number of Hollywood films. Why, for example, in Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat (2000), is the French actress Juliette Binoche—like everyone else in the film—speaking English? When did English become the lingua franca of provincial French villages? To have allowed for French dialogue with English subtitles in this case, to re-present the process of translation rather than “represent” it (which is only to say “erase” it), would undoubtedly have been a less domesticating technique. But the fact that such a simple and ordinary technique would have effectively [End Page 89] Click for larger view View full resolution Figures 1–3. Dissolve translation in Daughter of the Dragon. Paramount, 1931. [End Page 90] minoritized the dialogic imagination of American audiences only illustrates the degree to which Hollywood has so completely domesticated its translation of the foreign. What for an international audience would be a drastic defamiliarization (the world speaking English, everywhere) becomes for American viewers absolutely quotidian, a simple representation of the world as such. Hollywood’s “foreign” characters are, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s words, monolingual aphasics “thrown into absolute translation” (Monolingualism, 61). One can quickly surmise, however, that Hollywood studios have significant financial reasons for not re-presenting “foreign” languages in these cases. With few exceptions, monolingual American audiences have been notoriously insular and intolerant of “foreign” language programming or films.2 In her keynote address at the 2004 San Francisco International Film Festival, B. Ruby Rich tried to explain this ongoing American resistance to subtitled foreign films, speculating that perhaps “foreign films function as a rebuke for some viewers, offering up evidence of something that watching television or Hollywood movies cannot yield, namely, evidence that the world is not made in ‘our’ image, and that neither our society nor our language is universal” (166). In an impassioned post–9/11 call for more subtitled foreign-language films in American theaters, Rich suggests that the use of subtitles might even be something like an “anti-war gesture,” allowing us to “hear other people’s voices intact,” providing a more immediate “access to their subjectivity,” making it, somehow, “harder to kill people when you hear their voices” (168). Rich may not have known at the time, perhaps, though it is widely known today, that the summer before her argument for the inherent “anti-war gesture” performed by subtitled films in the United States, the Pentagon held a special screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s French- and Arabic-language classic, The Battle of Algiers (1966)—with subtitles. It may have been that Pentagon officials wanted a more immediate access to the subjectivity of the insurgents depicted in Pontecorvo’s film, but most likely for purposes antithetical to Rich’s hopeful cosmopolitanism.3 Still, it seems fair to say that most Americans have not seen Pontecorvo’s film, and that while foreign-language...
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Sep 8, 2016
Susan Slyomovics 
Open Access