ИСТИНА

The Soviet Union took pride in its rich dubbing tradition that was established in 1935 when the American movie The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933) was dubbed into Russian at the All-Union Cinema and Photo Research Institute (NIKFI). Dubbing was chosen because the literacy rate in the country in the mid-1930s was not very high despite the fact that the Likbez (Elimination of illiteracy) campaign had been in full swing for 16 years by that time; therefore subtitling would have been a rather inefficient way of getting the wide Soviet public acquainted with foreign movies. Yet another reason was the possibility of audiocensoring, as it were, those passages in the original soundtracks that were deemed politically hazardous. In subsequent years the high quality of the Soviet dubbing became well known the world over. When the famous Italian actress Guilietta Masina watched the Russian dubbed version of Nights of Cabiria she was so impressed that later in her conversation with Larisa Pashkova, the Russian voice artist who dubbed her heroine, exclaimed, “To think how masterfully you made me speak Russian!” The advent of VHS in the late 1970s made the voice-over technique exceptionally popular in the Soviet Union: a single simultaneous interpreter would interpret the whole movie into Russian, sometimes over a previously made Polish simultaneous VO. The collapse of the Soviet dubbing school that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a decade of continuously deteriorating quality of AVT in Russia due to an influx of unqualified amateurs into the profession. In the last 10-odd years the situation has been slowly changing for the better with the Renaissance of the glorious Soviet dubbing traditions gaining momentum and courses in AVT becoming an integral part of language departments’ curricula. The development of new technologies provides today’s cinema translators with new powerful tools, one of them being palimpsest (a CGI technique that consists in the replacement of the original written texts seen in a movie with those in the target language). The Higher School of Translation and Interpretation of Lomonosov Moscow State University launched a course in AVT in 2012 and has been a leader in this field in Russia ever since.