[OLAC-credits] The limits of translation

[Kelley McGrath]

If you've annotated very many credits, I am sure you have run into credits that don't fit into the usual director, producer, etc. categories and are hard to interpret or translate. Here is a very interesting example from a Russian film:

 "kino-razvedchik Dʹziga Vertov"

Tom Dousa, who has been translating from various languages, investigated and found out the following:

I’ve taken a look at the curious term “kino-razvedchik” which, literally translated, means “film-scout” (or “cine-scout”) or “film-spy” (or cine-spy”). The term is highly unusual because it is a technical term coined by D’ziga Vertov, who was a theoretician, as well as a maker of films. In his theory of documentary film, a “film-scout” or “film-spy” was somebody who went out,  “scouted out” suitable social situations for filming. He used the term “razvedchik”—which carried overtones of “military reconnaissance”, because of its association with the activities of the Pioneers (i.e., the soviet equivalent to Boy Scouts), who were trained as scouts. For more on the term, see Jeremy Hicks, _Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film_. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 35-36 (available outline here: http://www.cronistas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/DZIGA-VERTOV-Defining-Documentary-Film.pdf). Thus, in characterizing himself as a “Kino-razvechik”, Vertov was describing himself as a documentary filmmaker/news gatherer.  The important thing for our purposes is that “Kino-razvedchik” is a very theory-specific term, which is not likely to have a precise equivalent in English-language film terminology.

***
I hope spring comes soon for everyone.

Kelley
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