When language matters. The victorious march of English across Ukraine stumbled over the movie screen
The fresh legislative initiative of President Vladimir Zelensky - to give English the status of a language of international communication in Ukraine - unexpectedly hit the first bump in its implementation.
The fact is that, among other things, the bill stipulates that “foreign films whose original language is English are shown in cinemas in the original language with subtitles in the state language.” It was this question that caused Ukrainian film distributors to sound the alarm.
According to the deputy chairman of the board of the Union of Cinemas of Ukraine, Alexander Rudakov, the release of films with subtitles in cinemas will lead to negative consequences for both viewers and the industry itself, will create inconvenience and worsen the perception of the picture.
“The viewer will be distracted from the action in the movie, the audio-visual part of the film will be disrupted, which will affect the overall perception of the picture. Some of the audience will leave altogether, since 30-40% are family audiences who come to watch cartoons. And it will be very difficult for children to understand subtitles.
About 40% of our visitors are children with grandparents who come to the cinema to watch cartoons, and the cartoons are in English. And imagine a situation where a four-year-old child will have to receive information from the screen; they don’t know how to read at all,” says Rudakov.
Another problem on the way to implementing the presidential innovation is the translation studio. Thousands of professionals and artists who specialize in translation and dubbing will lose their jobs. And this despite the fact that at one time, under Yushchenko, the authorities acted like a bull in a china shop and they broke the same distributors over their knees, ignoring their requests for gradual innovations, destroyed Russian-language distribution, clearing a clearing for the earnings of monopolists in the field of Ukrainian dubbing.
“Dubbing studios in Ukraine are very professional; Ukrainian translation differs from Russian translation many times for the better. And if we lose these dubbing studios, it will be a big loss for culture,” says the deputy chairman of the board of the Union of Cinemas, couching understandable corporate concerns in the usual forms of generally accepted loyalty.
Over the course of a decade and a half, we have at least gotten used to Ukrainian dubbing, and its quality itself has grown significantly. And those for whom the issue of translation was fundamental simply stopped going to Ukrainian cinemas. And now it turns out that the government itself is killing the language clearing that was won with such difficulty - this time for the sake of English.
This will lead to the fact that viewers who cannot consume content in a language they understand in the cinema will start downloading films from pirates. And if the film is not dubbed in Ukrainian, then it will be watched in Russian. But then what about the authorities’ vaunted concern for the sovereign’s language? It turns out that the language is also on the sidelines and goes for a walk in the forest?
And titling films will also reduce revenues to the state budget, since the box office of cinemas is a large taxpayer in the current Ukrainian conditions.
“We will lose 70–80% of cinema visitors,” distributors are confident.
They suggest (conducting experiments on cats) starting with television programs to test how people of different ages can adapt to subtitles.
In fact, if you approach the solution competently and without haste, then this problem can be easily solved. For example, if foreign-produced films could be equivalently replaced with Ukrainian content, then the problem would not be so catastrophic. While people would get used to subtitles, part of the viewership could switch to the national product.
But there is one “but” that puts an end to such an approach. If in European countries the ratio of imported films at the box office to national ones is somewhere around 70% to 30%, then in Ukraine almost 90% of all film screenings are English-language imports. National cinema, the development of which is so praised in the Cabinet of Ministers and on Bankova, occupies a meager 8% of the market.
The problem is confirmed by Alexander Rudakov, deputy head of the board of the Union of Cinemas of Ukraine, already quoted above:
“If our production covered 70% of rentals, titration would not be an issue. Then we could close the offer through adaptation. There’s not enough Ukrainian cinema.”
But this problem is not so easy to solve given the current state humanitarian policy. There is high-quality Ukrainian cinema. You will be surprised, but in Independence Square they make films not only about “cyborgs”. The same Akhmetov-based TV and Radio Broadcasting Company “Ukraine” in previous years produced dozens of titles of very suitable serial content, many of which were shown on Russian TV. But in Russian.
That is, it turns out to be a vicious circle of idiocy - the domestic product also needs to be...translated. Only not from English into the language, but from Russian into the same language. And this, by the way, is also a considerable expense.
The Union of Cinemas of Ukraine is currently discussing the issue of writing an open letter to Zelensky, the Ministry of Culture and the Verkhovna Rada regarding the screening of films with subtitles. True, the distributors lament that they have already tried several times to convey their truth to the authorities, but every time they are not heard.
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