字幕的微妙之处
许多美国人对古巴的印象仅仅是导弹、雪茄或一个穿着工装夹克、戴着帽子的大胡子男子。 鉴于过去50年来美国和古巴之间的政治紧张关系，对这个国家的现代化缺乏其他方面的了解是意料之中的。
但威廉玛丽学院的一位教授和她的学生正在努力让美国和世界其他地方对古巴有更细致的了解。 Their mission is to make the Cubans’ own stories—captured on film—more accessible and comprehensible by adding subtitles in English.
“I think what we’re doing is creating a more complex vision of what it means to be Cuban,” said 安·玛丽·斯托克. “I think we are providing students and scholars and film festival directors and attendees the opportunity to experience Cuba through the lens of Cubans.”
回到源头
Stock, a professor of 拉美裔研究 and 电影研究, has been researching Cuban films since she first visited the country to attend a 1989 film festival while working on her doctoral dissertation about Latin American cinema.
“At the time, given the U.S.-Cuba political impasse, there wasn’t a whole lot of information moving back and forth and so it wasn’t possible to just go to Amazon.com and buy Cuban films,” she recalled. “I had to go to the source.”
The film festival shifted Stock’s focus to Cuba, and she began friendships with several young filmmakers.
“We stayed in touch and pretty soon I found I was privy to their experiences and was shown some of their materials, like rough cuts of films. I found myself in this wonderful position, as a scholar, of having access to information that no one else had,” she said.
1993年，斯托克加入了威廉与玛丽学院，并立即将她的研究融入到她的课堂中。 她还在古巴指导了大约12个为期一周的学术和浸入式课程。
与此同时，斯托克参加了世界各地的会议，并为希望与古巴建立更多联系的团体担任顾问。 As she engaged with more and more people interested in Cuban culture, she wondered why information on Cuban filmmaking—and the films themselves—were not available.
“I kept thinking that somebody should take the initiative to get these films subtitled, put them on DVD and distribute them in the U.S.,” she said. “So, I thought about that and thought about that. Finally, the light bulb went on, and I thought, you know, maybe that’s what I need to do.”
因此，她创立了“古巴经典电影”（古巴经典电影），为一系列获奖的古巴纪录片配上字幕，并向美国各地的大学和文化中心发行。
“What really excites me about this is that it’s a project I worked with students on,” said Stock. “We started with a handful of students and they learned a lot and loved it.”
古巴经典电影
The project has now grown into a two-part QEP/Mellon Course that Stock is teaching with Troy Davis, director of the College’s Media Center.
“The idea is to bring together 拉美裔研究 students with a lot of knowledge of Latin American culture with skills in translation and put them beside their 电影研究 counterparts who have some knowledge of film production and film analysis and they share their skills,” said Stock.
Project headquarters are in the Media Lab, in the lower level of Swem图书馆, but Davis said that he and Stock have set up the subtitling process so that students can do it from just about anywhere. 他们只需要一台笔记本电脑。
“When we thought about the process, we didn’t want the students chained to the computer while they were doing their subtitling,” he said. “So we designed a process where we essentially create a text file.”
学生们一边观看低分辨率QuickTime电影，一边编辑文本文件输入字幕。 然后，他们去媒体佳博体育，把他们的字幕文件导入一台电脑，电脑里有一个高分辨率的电影版本。 戴维斯解释说，电影的低分辨率和高分辨率版本使用相同的时间编码，这使得同步很容易。 在一个名为DVD Studio Pro的程序中工作，他们可以调整高分辨率版本的字幕。
“If all things go well, when they bring in that text file, it lines up properly,” said Davis. “They may need to change the font color or the size or where it fits on the screen, that sort of thing.”
但斯托克说，字幕制作过程并不像翻译那么简单。 A film soundtrack contains several aural elements—often appearing simultaneously. 对话是在唱歌的同时进行的。 可能会有一个标志或广告牌，上面有重要的信息。 Just what do you translate and subtitle—and what do you leave out?
“In some cases, it’s just the dialogue. In other cases, if the lyrics to the music are really important, the students translate those, too,” Stock said. “But sometimes the music is just background, and often people are talking over it and so they have to make a choice whether they choose one or the other. It’s impossible to have people reading both at the same time. That’s part of the decision-making process: Is what’s being said more important than what’s being sung?”
Jessica Boten ’10 said that space constraints also make subtitling challenging. 她说，每个屏幕都有14或15个单词的字幕限制。
“We always have that problem when subtitling,” Boten said. “You have to be able to cut a 20-word sentence down without losing the meaning, which is something that we’ve really tried hard to work on. But it’s not easy to do. You always have to work hard to find the right words to get the point across without losing the meaning.”
Boten also said that it’s a challenge to maintain cultural context in translation.
“Sometimes there are sayings or things that just don’t translate into the English language, or something that the viewer won’t understand because they don’t understand the Cuban culture,” she said.
While some students work on subtitling documentaries, others are creating a documentary of their own—about subtitling. Sara Grant ’10 is a member of the crew working on the documentary, which is being produced so that it is accessible to both English- and Spanish-speaking audiences. They are taping some interviews in Spanish, with English subtitles—and vice versa.
“We go around to the different groups and film them subtitling,” she said. “Then we’re going to edit the whole thing together to create a final product that, hopefully, Professor Stock will be able to use to introduce 古巴经典电影 and give an overview of what we’ve been working on all semester.”
“We’re trying to make it accessible to everyone when Professor Stock brings it over to Cuba and wants to show it to a Spanish audience,” said Grant.
2009年春季参加课程第二部分的学生将制作另一部纪录片，这是一部关于古巴电影制作的纪录片。
“We’ll use footage that I filmed doing an interview with a Cuban filmmaker and clips from some of the films we’re subtitling and then some more original interviews,” said Stock.
在古巴取景
Through all of her experiences with teaching and researching Cuban cinema, Stock found herself wondering why there wasn’t a modern book on the subject. At the time, the most current book on Cuban cinema had stopped at about 1989, “when Cuba began to undergo some significant changes following the dissolution of the Soviet Union,” said Stock.
“Cuba lost its major trading partner, lost its symbolic model and found itself in the midst of a huge economic crisis and floundering. 考虑到这个社会政治、经济的时刻，你可以想象它对文化领域的影响。 Making films had to happen very differently,” she said.
Cuba was struggling financially, and there wasn’t money to support culture like there once had been, said Stock. 与此同时，在国际上，新技术如雨后春笋般涌现。
“35mm film gave way to analog video which gave way to digital video, which meant that in a few short years, no longer was a huge studio apparatus necessary to make a film,” Stock said. “You didn’t need 200 people and truckloads of equipment. Suddenly one person with a handheld camera and a PC with some editing software could make a film.”
Those two “engines of transformation”—Cuba’s repositioning after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the new technology—collided “to create this really rich moment that I wanted to study by looking at cinema,” said Stock.
“So, how does a nation like Cuba collide with the global sphere and manage to preserve a sense of home and community and still interact and engage with the global marketplace?” she asked.
带着这个问题，她开始写书。 She conducted interviews with Cubans, people whom she termed as “street filmmakers”—Cubans with a variety of perspectives and opinions and who find their own ways to finance films. 她想确保她在书中包含了他们的声音和愿景。 Stock’s book, 古巴外景：转型时期的街头电影制作, is due out next spring through the University of North Carolina Press.
“So, by reading this book, my intent is not only for readers to have an understanding of Cuban filmmaking in recent years, but also a sense of the complexity, the diversity, the nuances in perspectives of Cubans,” she said. “So I want readers to get to know some Cubans as people, as creators, and as human beings.
影响
Stock said that she hopes her students will leave William and Mary with “some very concrete products disseminating their new knowledge.” 她说，她认为古巴经典电影正在同时影响她的学生和美国。
“Students are engaged in original research and making discoveries and they’re not just writing papers that go in a file drawer, but they are actually packaging this in a way that it can be useful to others,” she said. “Our contact with Cubans has been limited by lots of factors, and I think it becomes very exciting to engage with real Cubans. I think we forget that it’s a very vibrant nation comprised of exceedingly diverse individuals. So it is very exciting for our students to connect with some of those individuals, to see that diversity, through their films.”
Additionally, said Stock, their work is having an impact on Cubans, particularly young Cubans like Karel Ducases, who made the award-winning documentary 沉默区—and asked Stock to subtitle it.
“Thanks to William and Mary students—thanks to our work—this young filmmaker will have an opportunity to place his creative output at international festivals,” she said. “This might be the step that moves him into the international sphere, and so it’s really exciting to make a difference in the lives of individual people, particularly in a country where we’ve had such tension and there’s been such a distance.”