Kazan — summer 2010

It's a rainy Fourth of July here in Kazan, which means our visit to the lake and celebration were cancelled. Bummer. But it left me with the opportunity to go see the movie "Eclipse" in Russian. I enjoyed it.

Unless you are a translation professional, you probably never think about the details of what it takes to dub a talking movie into another language. The trick for movie translation is this: when you can translate the same sentence several ways, you choose the one that matches the lip movements of the on-screen characters as much as possible. It's quite an art. And the Russians are really good at it. As I watched the movie I essentially lost all sense of it being a translation. It just worked for me as its own thing. That speaks volumes about the professionalism both of the translators and the voice talent.

The other thing I was pleased with was how well I comprehended it all. People assume that because I've studied Russian for thirty years that I always understand everything. Nope. When you learn a foreign language as an adult, you never know everything that someone who learned it as a child knows. I came away from this movie encouraged that in fact I really do know Russian half decently. But it would be even better if I could live here for a year or two.