Film Translation

I research live translation of sound films–also called “live dubbing,” “simultaneous film translation,” and “spoken cinema”–as a key infrastructure for transnational circulation of cinema, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere outside the West, during the Cold War.

Essays

“On Soviet Spoken Cinema,” in Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Networks, Exchanges, ed. Alice Lovejoy and Mari Pajala (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022), 157–75.

“The Liberation Politics of Live Translation,” In Media Res, October 30, 2020.

“The Liberation Politics of Live Translation: Global South Cinemas in Soviet Tashkent,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 4 (2020): 183–88.

“The Politics of Translation at Soviet Film Festivals during the Cold War,” SubStance 44, no. 2 (2015): 66–87.

“Listening to the Inaudible Foreign: Simultaneous Translators and Soviet Experience of Foreign Cinema,” in Sound, Music, Speech in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, ed. Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 162-178.

Talk

“The Politics of Film Translation,” Conference “Saving Bruce Lee — African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy”, HKW — Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, January 20, 2018.

Image: A scene from Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de torchon (1981), where a local interpreter translates a French sound film into Wolof live in colonial Senegal.