The other day I found myself at an ‘Evenings on Campus’ event at the University. The offering of the night was Kaurismäki’s Le Havre, a quite wonderful film with definite resonances on migration, life in harbour towns, and so on. That, and a student at the Faculty of Arts had taken the trouble to add subtitles, in Maltese.

It’s tempting to don one’s anorak and nitpick over the details. For example, I had to wonder what on earth “ħoss ta’ bronja taċ-ċpar” meant – until I realised it referred to the sound of a foghorn, silly me. One might even ask what the whole point was, given that most good foreign films are subtitled in English and that Maltese people who watch foreign films are likely to know that language.

All of which is trite and best left alone. Rather, I was struck by two things. First, the student had done an excellent job, foghorn or no foghorn. Second, adding Maltese subtitles to a film is not just a matter of accuracy of timing and translation.

Le Havre is a French film. To most of us, French is foreign enough a language for it not to carry too much baggage beyond a veneer of decadence and sophistication (a fact that restauranteurs understand too well for our good). Given that neither of the two happens to define the film in question, the experiment with the Maltese subtitles went swimmingly.

Until someone whispered in my ear that the film that got the treatment last year was Fight Club. Now I know that Brad Pitt is partial to braġjoli and likes nothing better than to occupy beaches and put up RTO signs all over the place – that he is well on his way to becoming Maltese, in other words. Still, the thought of him speaking the language on screen is hard for me to stomach.

Fight Club was, as far as I know, subtitled. That’s challenge enough to one’s digestion. But what if someone made it their mission to go the whole hog and actually dub the film?

Like many people of my generation, I was brought up on English-language films that had been dubbed in Italian. That’s because we depended almost entirely on Italian channels, unless we wished to spend our evenings deconstructing Kikku u Sika and the other low-budget banalities that took up most of the local airtime.

Dubbed films were second nature to us. Dirty Harry was L’Ispettore Callaghan, and the coolest man on the planet said “il mio nome è Bond, James Bond”. I remember it wasn’t easy to wean myself off the type when videos and eventually DVDs flooded in, closely followed by a battalion of English-language TV channels.

So why, assuming I’m right at all, would Maltese present problems? It’s a fine language with a decent-enough vocabulary (a foghorn by any other name), and it’s also the language the overwhelming majority of us are most comfortable with.

Indeed, there’s the rub. I think there are two reasons why Brad Pitt would look odd speaking Maltese. Both of them have to do with the local history of language and language use. (The kind of topic explored by Joseph Brincat in his landmark Maltese and other languages, for those who wish to go beyond a columnist’s ramblings.)

The first reason is that Maltese is believed to be ours and ours alone.

Someone who is most certainly not racist told me the other day that they found it “strange” to relate to a black person who spoke Maltese fluently, as the Maltese do. The argument has everything to do with foreignness, for want of a better word.

To dub a foreign film in Maltese is to try to drag it kicking and screaming to a context to which many of us like to think it doesn’t belong

It’s the same drift which put a dent in Rebecca Cremona’s Simshar, otherwise a fairly powerful film. For some reason, ­Cremona cast as the protagonist (Simon, the survivor) a Tunisian actor whose Maltese had a strong foreign accent. Problem was that, given the plot and context, we needed to think of Simon as Maltese through and through.

The reverse logic works just as well. To dub a foreign film in Maltese is to try to drag it kicking and screaming to a context to which many of us think, and like to think, it doesn’t belong. It feels somehow odd and removed from its natural habitat.

True or not, the sense that Maltese extends from Marsaxlokk to Marsalforn is strong and deep-rooted. Madly enough, it is in part the creature of the linguistic nationalists who harp on and on about “our language”.

That’s part of the explanation. I said earlier that Le Havre with Maltese subtitles went down well; I dare say it wouldn’t sound too out of place dubbed.

The same cannot be said of English-language films. English is not just Malta’s second, it is also our prestige language whether or not we think that should be the case. Hollywood and Brad Pitt are all about a distant glamour. They are the paragon of prestige, one might say. Make them speak Maltese and that charm is all but lost.

I know someone who ends her phone conversations with her mother with an “I love you”. Given that she is generally Maltese-speaking, I once asked her if she would consider the local version.

Her answer was that if she did her mother would probably think she was planning to commit suicide, and that those words in Maltese were reserved for somewhat different situations, possibly after a drink or two. Like I said, it’s not simply a matter of translation.

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