Jota Martínez Galiana, Author at Jota Martínez Galiana

American Gods

Jota Martínez Galiana — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 14:25:40 +0000

The ideal thing would be that a literary saga was translated by the same person, and it is also ideal when you get to translate a whole series. In audiovisual translation, though, in the road between what’s ideal and what’s real there’s usually a bump called urgency. Because very often the definitive materials are not available until not long before the start of the season, it’s very seldom that I’m assigned a whole season, but, when I am, I have a blast. It’s really neat to be able to translate having a global view of the whole season, and not just with random episodes. The second season of these series didn’t blew my mind, but it was amusing, it was relatively easy to translate and had two bonuses: I translated into Catalan, which is a language that I get to work with less than with Spanish, and for an old client that I almost considered lost. I hope I could translate the third one too!

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Reality is a circle

Jota Martínez Galiana — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 18:48:55 +0000

We get the impression that our lives move forward, but I am a huge fan of Los Planetas and I think that we’re constantly turning in circular streams in time. And, sometimes, there’s an intersection in this movement, which, as if we were wormhole explorers, allows us to connect with the past from the present time. I am now a translator, but I used to be a journalist. I recently was asked to translate two interviews to Daniel García Andújar, the artist from Alicante who was one of net.art pioneers in Spain, by Valencian Government’s Museum Network. And this brought me back 20 years, when I was working for El País newspaper and I wrote about the Museum of University of Alicante’s first in-house exhibition, dedicated to him and to Mira Bernabeu, another artist from Valencia. Even nicer and mesmerizing, though, was the surprise of finding my article at the artist’s web while I was doing research. I thought it had been lost in some dark newspaper library, but there it was, with its whole text and a photo. It you’re interested, you may read it here. By the way, the t-shirt that the artist is wearing in the photo is a flashback itself, because when I have seen it I’ve remembered that I also wore it for a while, because it was a gift from the museum and I loved it.

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“Quinqui” cinema with a cause

Jota Martínez Galiana — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 10:39:20 +0000

On my first day of my first visit to Porto I went to the Serralves Museum, and it was a nice surprise to find there an exhibition curated by Portuguese director Pedro Costa. I have never translated one of his films, but I have synchronized the electronic subtitles of some of them in different cinema festivals. The best of them, in my opinion, is the distressful No Quarto da Vanda (2000). Costa’s movies about drug-addicts have similarities with Spanish “quinqui” cinema: both are fiction, but also an almost anthropological portrait of certain youth from the skid rows that was ditched by Iberian progress, and in both the actors and actresses play the roles of themselves. Costa’s cinema, though, avoids what’s anecdotic and costumbrist and makes us dive in the exasperating monotony of those who cannot escape from the present moment, those who have no other future than their next dose, and no horizon beyond the four filthy walls of their shacks, where life evaporates like the fumes of smoked heroin. And, during the three hours of this film, while inside Vanda’s room, her life and her sister’s are crumbling from one aluminum foil puff to the other, in the outside the machines are tearing their shanty town down slowly but surely, a perfect parallelism between the process of personal (inside) and social (outside) demolition brought about by the relentless, mechanical advance of these capitalist societies that make no prisoners.

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Brrrave girrrls grrroal

Jota Martínez Galiana — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 17:41:18 +0000

As a music lover, and as an old chap who was young when the indie exploded, I am very excited about the reunion and tour of the crucial band Bikini Kill. This news has sow in me the seed of hope, as I wish I could see them live in Spain someday. In 2013 I had the pleasure and the honour of translating and subtitling The punk singer, the Sini Anderson’s documentary about the life and work of the lead singer, Kathleen Hannah, a most intelligent, sharp human being with a great talent for writing songs that swat straight at you, and who inoculated combative feminism in the 90’s alternative music agenda. It’s a terrific film that offers a great deal of data about Kathleen’s career, from her first steps as a fanzine editor to her claims with Bikini Kill, and does not forget her following projects, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin, until she was forced to stand down from the stage because of a nasty disease caused by a tick. This is the second film that I have translated for In-Edit Music Film Festival and ends up as the winner. The first one was About a son, another brilliant film about Kurt Cobain, who was a friend of Kathleen way before both became celebrities. You know, if you’ve made any film about grunge and you need it to be translated and you decide to contract my services, maybe you will even win some prizes. Modesty aside, of course.

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The Amazing Nina Simone

Jota Martínez Galiana — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 08:17:48 +0000

This article about the reissue of Nina Simone’s autobiography I put a spell on you, translated into Spanish by Eduardo Hojman and published by Libros del Kultrum with the title Víctima de mi hechizo. Memorias de Nina Simone, has remembered me of the documentary The Amazing Nina Simone, which I translated in 2015 for the music cinema festival In-Edit of Barcelona. It was not an easy translation. That was one of those documentaries where, if there’s not someone speaking in library footage, you have the narrator’s voice over, and the gaps are filled by songs with lyrics that must be translated too. It was rewarding, though, to be able to immerse myself in the complex life, overwhelming personality and political and social commitment of one of the greatest figures of music, one who, helas, was almost unknown to me beyond that famous video starred by cats.

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On the shoulders of giants

Jota Martínez Galiana — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 06:12:58 +0000

Around the middle of October, my nice and efficient, yet reckless, colleagues who organized the Audiovisual Translation International Conference (CITA), honored me with an invitation to participate in a debate about linguistic supervision. CITA is a biannual event where those who make actors speak to you in your own language or, at least, provide them with a little sign aka subtitle, have the chance to get out of our cave and see that, beyond our computer screens, there’s another world, which not only is possible, but it exists indeed, and that people we usually communicate with via email have actually faces, arms and legs. I sneaked there, among giants of the translation industry like our moderator, Josep Llurba, the man who translates almost everything that is dubbed in Spain, or Candace Whitman, whose professional experience is not of this world, or at least, not of mine. And with Alicia González Camino, who supervises materials from Disney, no more, no less. And with Victoria Tormo, who polishes and make audiovisual materials shine at the speed of light. And with Cristina Pérez, who masters the videogames realm, a field as alien to me as the edges of the Middle-earth. And even with Guillermo Parra, who translates and supervises all the films for the Americana Film Fest of Barcelona, who participated, as some sort of electronic goblin, via video. And, in the middle of all those champions, there was I, trying to describe my modest contributions as a supervisor in series like The Powerpuff Girls and hoping not to make a fool of myself everytime I had to open my mouth.

You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wfeKbeUPnQ&feature=youtu.be

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Subtitles via wifi in your cell phone

Jota Martínez Galiana — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 17:09:41 +0000

The German Parliament has been celebrating its 130 years of history duiring this last summer and part of the autumn. There have been daily visual shows about its history that used the very building as a screen. The multi-language subtitling system was quite ingenuous. The audio, with the exception of some parts in English was, obviously, in German, and the video was subtitled in English on one of the Parliament’s wall in the banks of the Spree river, as you can see in the photograph. If someone needed subtitles in another language, i.e. in Spanish, that person just needed to connect his or her cell phone to the event’s wifi and then select the correct language. The subtitles were displayed in the mobile phone’s screen. It’s a practical, easy and effective solution for short videos (I think it would become uncomfortable with longer ones). That’s German technology for you!

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Subtitles, camera… action

Jota Martínez Galiana — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 05:39:00 +0000

As a translator, subtitling action movies is always contradictory for me. I am talking about the worst action movies: those of patriotic heroes and shots everywhere. On one hand, I find this genre not only boring, but also repulsive. Its flat, no-nuances plots and its clumsy, stale speeches offend my intelligence. I find its gratuitous violence and its macho and military stench unmoral. On the other hand, if we just think about the work, when you are getting paid per minute, one of these “jewels” of the silver screen is always a gift. Very little dialogue, a high percentage of monosyllables, a coarse, unsubstantial vocabulary… You can finish them in half, if not three times less, the time it usually takes you to finish other films. Nevertheless, it’s very seldom, if ever, that I get these kinds of assignments, luckily for my mental health… unfortunately for my pocket, though.

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Subtitling art

Jota Martínez Galiana — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 08:38:13 +0000

I’ve been countless time watching a video-installation at a museum and I have asked myself, “Who’s the lucky bastard that subtitled this?” That’s exactly why I was so excited when the Centre del Carme Museum of València asked me to subtitle an 80 minutes video by German artist Grace Schwindt, which is included in the collective exhibition …Suposa tot açó una possibilitat? This video, “Only a Free Individual Can create a Free Society”, reproduces, through performance and dance, the conversation that the artist, who grew up surrounded by left-wing activists, had with one of them about the idea of freedom and the ability to obtain it. I am very proud and grateful to the curator, Juan Luis Toboso, whose trust in my job has brought my subtitles to nowhere but one of the Consorci de la Generalitat Valenciana’s museums.

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Steak Revolution

Jota Martínez Galiana — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 19:03:14 +0000

Can someone who does not eat meat translate a documentary about the quest for the best steak on the planet? He can, indeed, because to do some research about the differences among wagyu or angus beef or the meat of an aged ox in some hidden corner of Leon, Spain, does not mean that you must taste them. Given that I like cooking, translating documentaries about food is always a pleasure, and this one is amusing and teaches you a lot… although I have no intention whatsoever of doing field research to find out if I agree or not with their classification.

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