TRADUIRE consists of a series of remarks about translating from Hebrew into other languages, delivered in succession by the translators. The film is strongly unified by a repeated pattern of photography featuring the translators standing by their windows and sitting in their workspaces, with cutaway shots showing the translators' neighborhoods and with close-ups of Hebrew pages. The color and focus are extraordinary. How much aesthetic importance there was to putting such a film together, as opposed to printing the translators' remarks in a little book, could be debated; but I suspect people are more easily persuaded to sit down for a movie than to sit down with a book, and the translators' remarks are often intriguing. They largely apply to the art of translation in general, but of course Hebrew is a special case because of its religious and Zionist resonance.
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