Tonto Talk
Tonto and The Lone Ranger just before we wore his mask
Someone watching Jean-Luc Godard's "Film Socialisme" on DVD has a choice of subtitles, including one for "Navajo English". These so-called "Tonto subtitles" are the first choice, followed by the "full English" translation. Godard is difficult enough to comprehend without deliberately deficient subtitling. But, as usual, the man has a point. In fact, he hatched the idea thirty years ago in his 1982 film "Passion":
"Do you know why the white men killed all the Indians?
Because the Indians didn't say, 'I don't understand.'
They said, 'Me no understand.'
So the white men killed them,
not because they didn't understand,
but because they didn't say it right.
That's all."
(7:26)
My understanding of this verbal shorthand is enhanced by my wife's experience as a special educator. One of her former deaf students visited us recently. He suffers partial hearing loss and in chatting with him it became clear to me he was hearing some -- but not all -- of my words. If our chat had subtitles from his point of view, they would be in Tonto Talk.In his Vulture review of "Filmsocialisme", Logan Hill notes:
Godard has described his subtitles as "Navajo English," and that would be true — if pidgin-speaking Navajos rode on luxury liners quoting Derrida, lamenting fascism, and pretending not to notice the llama next to the gas pump (long story). There are almost no noun-verb-object constructions, though it's not really Tonto-speak. Instead, the subtitles are really more like keyword tags to a blog post.
Writing in Senses of Cinema, Samuel Bréan provides greater detail -- with footnotes -- on how Godard arrived at Tonto Talk:
Jean-Luc Godard would liked to have shown Film Socialisme without any subtitles at the Cannes film festival, but both his French distributor Wild Bunch and the festival urged him to provide English subtitles. He agreed, provided that he could make them "his way" -- a request that was met favorably. There wasn't much hesitation from Wild Bunch since "the film was already experimental as it was." Godard then asked Lenny Borger and Cynthia Schoch, who did the English subtitles for his two previous features, Éloge de l'amour (2001) and Notre Musique (2004), to translate the French dialogue entirely, without telling them why.
He took this English text as the basis for what he called the "Navajo, Comanche, Cheyenne (etc.) English translation." (3)
With a marker pen, he crossed out the words that did not interest him and left only those which seemed especially meaningful to him, before rearranging them ... Some portions of dialogue were left entirely untranslated. Finally, the subtitles were inserted using subtitling software. This is the opposite of the "normal" way: nowadays, subtitles are first "timed." Then comes the translation itself and finally, what is called a "simulation", i.e. a final check. (4) In the case of Film Socialisme, the spotting came last (during the simulation) and is deliberately inaccurate: subtitles sometimes start before or after a character speaks.
A story published before the premiere of the film announced that this would be "as in old Westerns where the Native Americans spoke in choppy phrases", (5) that is to say, what one critic has dubbed "Hollywood Injun English." (6) As always with Godard, things are not to be taken at face value. These seemingly "simple" subtitles are not in pidgin English or "Tonto speech": it is more complex than that.
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