China and the U.S. Join Forces on North Korea

By THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

David E. Sanger, chief Washington correspondent, and Marcus Mabry, Rendezvous’ editor, discuss North Korea’s nuclear strike warnings and whether a new round of sanctions, written by China and the United States, can work.

High Stakes for 2 Royal Ballet Premieres

LONDON â€" Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon are, with reason, frequently referred to as the most important ballet choreographers working today. A new ballet by either is reason for excitement, so it was quite a coup for the Royal Ballet â€" and a shot in the arm for the company’s new director, Kevin O’Hare â€" when the company announced last year that two commissions were in the bag, on a single program.

Expectations were at positively dizzy heights by the time the program opened at the Royal Opera House last week (the program is being performed three more times, including tonight). The Russian-born Mr. Ratmansky, who is artist in residence at American Ballet Theater, has choreographed for most of the world’s major ballet troupes, and his work has been extensively seen in London â€" but he had never before created a piece for the Royal Ballet.

The British Mr. Wheeldon, who danced briefly with the oyal Ballet before moving to the New York City Ballet, has made several pieces for his former company, but this one is the first since Mr. O’Hare invited him to take the position of artistic associate.

As if this didn’t make the stakes high enough, the two new works â€" Mr. Ratmansky’s “24 Preludes,” and Mr. Wheeldon’s “Aeternum” (why the current fashion for Latin names in ballet) â€" were preceded by Balanchine’s 1928 “Apollo,” still a benchmark for what it might mean to break new ground in classical dance.

After the fever-pitch buildup, it’s not really surprising that the excitement that preceded the premieres was matched by disappointment after them. The droves of critics who attended seemed, mostly, to let out a collective exhale of discontent.

“Both have produced work of expected skill, which feel as if they’re fulfilling the commissioning company’s expectations rather than either of them insisting on saying something keenly personal,” wrote Is! mene Brown on The Artsdesk.

“The cast dance through Ratmansky’s fluent and ingenious encounters, evoking sudden joys and mysterious despairs, and continue until there dawns the heretical thought that Chopin/Françaix is a damned bore, and that one more embrace, yet another fall to the ground with attendant moping, and enough is more than enough. Sixteen preludes: Da! Twenty-four preludes: Nyet! And to Siberia with the orchestration,” wrote Clement Crisp in “The Financial Times.”

Benjamin Britten’s 1941 “Sinfonia da Requiem,” to which Mr. Wheeldon’s ballet was set, is “gloomy and strenuous. Mr. Wheeldon’s ballet is gloomier, and more strenuous,” wrote Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times.

Some critics were happier. “”Aeternum seizes the attention ferociously,” write Mark Monahan in The Telegraph. “It is also immensely original and constantly surprising.”

Zoe Anderson in The Independent thought that Mr. Ratmansky’s work, at least was worthy of the hype: “Ratmansky’s magnificent new work for the Royal Ballet glows at the heart of an awkward triple bill,” she wrote.

But it’s Ms. Brown who summed up the problem: “The curse of ‘Apollo’ strikes,’ she wrote. Masterpieces are in short supply.

Ten Years After the Invasion of Iraq, a World of Hurt

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. You could certainly be forgiven for thinking it might be a time for reflection, remembrance and, ultimately, moving on.

As it happens, though, this year’s anniversary is opening plenty of new wounds. From the Pentagon to the British court system, and even to Uganda, fresh revelations about torture, murder, kidnapping and alleged body-part snatching are surfacing.

The Guardian newspaper unveiled the results of a year-long investigation purporting to show that U.S. military advisers, with the knowledge and support of many senior officials, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and disgraced Gen. David Petraeus, oversaw a vast program of torture inside Iraqi prisons.

According to the British daily, two senior merican military officials, Col. James Steele and Col. James H Coffman, ran a high-level secret program inside Iraqi prisons to extract information from alleged insurgents and Al Qaeda terrorists.

The program was reportedly funded with millions of dollars in American assistance, and was run with the connivance of members of several radical Shiite militias who tortured their captives. An Iraqi general, Muntadher al-Samari, told the newspaper that the two American advisers “knew everything that was going on there…the most horrible kinds of torture.”

The revelation is, in the saddest possible way, the fulfillment of what James Fallows of The Atlantic magazine predicted six months before the March 19, 2003 invasion. In a piece last week taking stock of the real toll of the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Fallows wrote that the war was “the biggest strategic error by the United States since at least the end of World War II and perhaps over a much longer period.”

If U.S. media coverage during the run up to the Iraq war is widely seen as less than skeptical, to put it mildly, the pushback ten years later is full-throated indeed.

Most of the stories appearing in newspapers and magazines this month focus on the tremendous losses the war incurred, be they economic ($3 trillion in taxpayer dollars evaporated), human (4,486 American dead, 32,226 American wounded and over 100,000 Iraqi dead) or political (the loss of American prestige abroad for years) instead of the victory over Saddam Hussein.

Writing in the St. Louis American about a recent scathing documentary film called Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, Jamala Rogers, a columnist, said, “We should be on fire abou the pack of lies that led us into a war.”

Even conservative former Bush speechwriter and conservative columnist David Frum conceded in the Daily Beast that “most Americans have condemned it as a disastrous mistake.” And the Military Times, in the first of a four-part series, acknowledged that military leaders still had questions about the “legality” of the war.

Though America was the principle architect of the war, its chief collaborator, Britain, is also facing ghosts on this tenth anniversary. Hearings began this week in what’s known as the Al-Sweady inquiry - a long-awaited investigation into the deaths and subsequent mutilation of se! veral Ira! qis killed during a May, 2004 firefight known as the Battle of Danny Boy, near Majar al-Kabir, in southern Iraq.

Some twenty Iraqis were killed. The Iraqi complainants in the case have long said that some of the initial victims were only wounded in the battle, but later tortured and killed after being taken to a nearby British base for questioning.

The inquiry has been a long time coming, and is bound to dredge up painful - and costly - memories, even as Britain, like much of the world, tries to come to terms with all it lost in the war. “It is damaging and unacceptable that it takes so long to address these matters,” said an editorial in the Herald Scotland.

One of the units involved in the incident, the Sutherland Highlanders, ormerly a part of the British Army, was integrated into Scotland’s forces in 2006. “This is not only morally wrong but self-defeating. It robs the UK of its moral authority to criticize brutality and high-handedness in the army or police in countries such as Zimbabwe, South Africa and Russia,” the paper editorialized.

During the inquiry, a high court judge accused the British defense ministry of “serious breaches” and “lamentable” behavior.

The legacy of the Iraq war is still alive in Africa. Uganda, whose partnership with George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” was mocked by many, was grappling with gruesome allegations this week when an African newspaper revealed that three Ugandan women who were lured to Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion allege that their organs were harvested there.

Last year, the BBC docum! ented a m! uch less sensational story: how more than 100 Ugandan women wound up in Iraq in the first place, attracted to the war zone by unscrupulous human traffickers posing as legitimate businessmen.

“If body parts are removed, do they grow” Chris Mudoola told All Africa News this week, calling for a medical examination of the women. Mr. Mudoola is accused of being the person who took the women to Iraq while working for an organization called Uganda Veterans Development Ltd, according to the paper.

No accounting of the war would be complete without a tally of the money lost in addition to the hundreds of thousands of lives. But even there, the news this week was grim. In its final, and perhaps most depressing, report yet, the Special U.S. Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction said this week that the roughly $206 billion in Iraqi and American funds designed to rebuild the country “underperformed.”

Scott Johnson is the author of the forthcoming memoir “The Wolf and the Watchman” about life with his CIA father, to be released by W.W Norton in May, 2013

In France, They Call It ‘Happiness Therapy’

Studiocanal French movie poster for “Silver Linings Playbook.”

PARISâ€"Friends will sometimes ask if you’ve seen a movie. You will say no. They will tell you what the plot is, and you will immediately realize that you have in fact seen the movie, just with a different title.

In France, where something like half of the movies released are American, movie titles in English are often translated (for example, “The Iron Lady” was “La Dame de Fer” in French, “The Ides of March” was released as “Les Marches du Pouvoir”), but recently, a number of films have been released with an English titleâ€"but a different one from the original. “Date Night” became “Crazy Night” “The Hanover” became “Very Bad Trip,” and “Get him to the Greek” was released as “American Trip.”

The most recent film confusing Anglophone Frenchies is “Silver Linings Playbook,” which in France is called “Happiness Therapy” Cécile Dehesdin, a writer for Slate.fr, called English title translations into simpler English her pet peeve. “Happiness Therapy” is her latest heartache.

The curious trend leads a person to believe that the French public would rather the title remain in English to keep its American cool, but that producers seek a more understandable title.

“It’s a true debate,” said Stéphane Réthoré, head of marketing at Universal France. “Every time we have a foreign film it’s a question we study carefully! .”

Giving the movie a French title could risk losing its “cool” because the English language still carries cachet, he explains. A French translation runs the risk of giving the film a ridiculous image and be counterproductive. A literal translation of “Silver Linings Playbook,” for example, would be incomprehensible to the general French public. Ms. Deshedin conceded the translation would be complex.

I’m not saying it’s easy. The title, “Silver Linings Playbook” is relatively opaque even for English speakers.… A literal translation into ‘Mode d’emploi du bonheur’ (Guide to Happiness) would be very cringe-worthy.

Google Translate proposes “Playbook doublure argentée.” Probably not the best option either.

Henri Ernst, head of distribution at UGC in France, has been responsible for many translations. He saw “Silver Linings Playbook,” a funny-sad love story about a man who returns home after a stay in a mental institution, at he Toronto film festival last autumn. “First thing I thought was, how on earth will they translate that” he said in a recent phone interview.

When his team starts planning the distribution for a movie, there are five key elements to the package they need to create: the title, the synopsis, the photos, the poster and the trailer. “With foreign films, the title is the first thing we think about; it’s the first thing people say and it’s extremely important,” he said.

“We have three options when we get a foreign film to distribute,” he explained. “Translation, adaptation or just keeping the original title.”

When they translate, they have to be careful to avoid a cheap and heavy result. Take Steve McQueen’s “Shame,” about a sex addict, for example, it could’ve never become “Honte” ; “it just doesn’t work,” said Mr. Ernst. The word “honte” is more about embarrassment; “shame” can carry a seedier connotation. They stayed with “Shame.”

When! the distributors adapt, they need to be careful to maintain the buzz that is already created around the movie on the Web, which argues for keeping the original title when possible. Today, release dates are also much closer together internationally than they were a decade ago. So a film that creates a buzz when it’s released in the United States will be talked about in Europe. Marketing campaigns have to be much more global, which is one of the reasons so many titles remain the same, or at least stay in English.

“Today, before they come out, films already have a life online. So distributors have to keep that in mind when they come up with the marketing package,” said Mr. Ernst.

It never used to be like that. Foreign films released in France had thought-out titles in French. “All titles used to be translated, and a lot of effort was put into it,” said Mr. Réthoré, giving the example of “High Noon,” which is known in France as “Le Train Sifflera Trois Fois.”

But now, evenfranchise films that used to carry French translations are retaining their American titles.

“We’re seeing films like ‘Die Hard,’ of which the first film that came out in the ’80s was translated into ‘Le Piège de Crystal,’ go back to their original title and come out today as ‘Die Hard 4,’ even in France. Or ‘Star Wars’; in the ’80s, we knew ‘Star Wars’ as ‘La Guerre des Étoiles,’ but now the younger generation knows it as ‘Star Wars.’ ”

In an online poll the Web site Newsring recently asked its readers if they were pro or con film title translation; 78 percent responded against.

In 2003, Mr. Ernst was in charge is distributing Stephen Frears’s “Dirty Pretty Things.” “It was a difficult decision,” he said. “It was the author’s title, and a beautiful one, so we didn’t want to change it. It was also quite easy to understand.”

In the ! end, they went with the same title, but with “Loin de chez eux” (Far From Home) as a subtitle.

And sometimes, keeping the English titles, as complicated as it may be, works out fine. The perfect example: “Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind,” which kept its mysterious title and did very well at the French box office.

But the approach depends on the genre. “You won’t think about a title the same way if you have a auteur movie in your hands, or one about alien terrorists attacking the White House,” says Mr. Ernst. Mark Wahlberg’s next movie “Pain and Gain” about the bodybuilding culture will be released in France under the name “Big & Bad,” or that “No Strings Attached” was simply translated into “Sex Friends.” No chance anyone won’t know what those films are about.

Children’s films are another story. The are almost always translated.

“Kids go and see films their mothers will allow them to see, and using an English title leads the mothers to beieve it’s too grown up for their kids.”

That is how “Up” became “Là-Haut,” “Despicable Me” became “Moi, Moche et Méchant” (a title Mr. Réthoré’s team came up with) and how “Finding Nemo” became “Le Monde de Nemo.”

But then France’s film market is a very particular one. According to a European Commission study from 2011, France is the only European country to offer showings of a foreign film in both a dubbed version and in its original language.

“Our country has a very specific cinema public,” says Mr. Ernst. “We have a very cinephile audience who has a good American movie culture. They’re fine with some titles being in English.”

How important is the title of a film to you Should titles be translated Have you come across translations that worked well, or didn’t