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Part of
Reassessing Dubbing: Historical approaches and current trends
Edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti
[Benjamins Translation Library 148] 2019
► pp. 17–39

Chapter 1
Undoing dubbing

Singin’ in the Rain

Focusing on the film industry’s transition to sound in the late 1920s, canonical musical Singin’ in the Rain is, foremost, a dubbing narrative. This chapter revisits this film classic in order to bring into focus lesser-known histories relating to screen translation, and to think specifically about the importance of talk and inter-lingual translation to the development of film culture broadly. Singin’s emphasis on dubbing as domestic operation invites reconsideration of the transition era’s ‘language crisis’ and the artificial voice/body combinations integral to foreign-language dubbing. Precisely because Singin’ does not deal directly with issues of inter-lingual translation, it demonstrates how sound technologies catapult issues of language difference and transfer to the very heart of film production, prefiguring the inter-lingual in the everyday.
Keywords: dubbing, Singin’ in the Rain, screen translation, talkies, voice, film sound, film history, indirect recording, synchronisation, lip-sync
Article outline
  • Tracing origins
  • Dubbing deconstructed
  • Sounding foreign
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Filmography
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.148.01dwy
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