I’m watching the credits for “Fanny and Alexander” (1982) and I see:
Special Effects
Bengt Lundgren
Why isn’t it in Swedish? I looked up the translation and in Swedish it’s Specialeffekter.
Why use English? I’ve noticed in other foreign language films that they don’t
translate and just use the English term.
I would guess the Swedish equivalent - specialeffekter - just didn’t exist at the time.
Ps. Hope you saw the 5-hour version. The 3-hour version is for mesar.
I’ve always been interested when loan words – words which are taken from another language – are adopted and then a direction translation is used.
Japanese tend to use loan words from English where Chinese more typically use direct translations. One reason for this is the written languages. While Chinese only has the written characters, Japanese also has two syllabaries, one of which is often used for foreign words, such as names, and loan words.
The English word “center” when used as an important facility such as a call center is written in Japanese as センター “sentaa” while Chinese use 中心 “zhōngxīn”. Japanese also has 中心 but is used only for the other English meanings of “center” such as the middle.
With movie making technology usually coming from America, it doesn’t surprise me that the Swedish movie industry simply adopted the English terminology.
Sure, in a hypothetical scenario. But the point is that there is a perfectly cromulent and commonly used Swedish term. It’s “specialeffekter”, as noted above.
I’m going with Steken’s theory.
Here’s my guess: As in so many other fields, English is the international language of the movie industry. There is a standardized nomenclature to describe all aspects of producing a motion picture. For somebody in the business, the term special effects precisely describes the function the individual who is listed in the credits actually performed. It’s a technical term.
It’s been quite a while since I saw Fanny and Alexander, but I don’t specifically recall the special effects, definitely not in the same way as, let’s say, in Independence Day or Die Hard.
Maybe they didn’t use the generic Swedish expression for special effects in the credits because it would have come as a surprise to the average viewer/reader to learn that there were any and because they weren’t central to the movie (yet they were included in the movie and somebody did the job).
When discussing movies in more general terms (i. e. not from a strictly technical standpoint), the native expressions are probably more frequently used.
Well, they do (spoiler)
set a person on fire. That was pretty memorable to me, at least.
Pretty sure that wasn’t the case in Sweden in 1982. The language of the Swedish movie industry in 1982 was probably 99.9% Swedish, and there were Swedish words from just about every bit and aspect and thingamajig and pryl - with the exception, it seems, of special effects. You’ll note that, in the end credits, no one else is credited using an English term; and that in the “making of,” you’ll hear lots and lots of technical terms being thrown around, all of which are in Swedish and none of which are in English. When Bergman worked in Germany, he spoke German though by his admission he didn’t speak it very well; when Tarkovsky came to Sweden and did a movie with Bergman’s cinematographer, the two men had to resort to a very crude and basic kind of Italian (!) to communicate. There was no common “standardized nomenclature” to fall back upon.
I don’t see how these aspects could possibly have been a factor. So what if the audience hadn’t noticed the work of the SFX team? So what if their efforts weren’t central to the film? That’s no excuse to bury them beneath an obscure foreign title, if a perfectly cromulent Swedish term was available. It’s not like Bergman attempted to hide them, any more than he tried to hide the stuntmen whose work and efforts and injuries are openly shown in the (by the way brilliant! marvellous! glorious!) “making of,” which he himself directed.
BTW: Just last night I saw 1976’s Mannen På Taket, the most action-heavy Swedish movie from the period - and, oddly enough, neither the special effects guys nor the stunt men were even credited in the end titles. Hmmmm.
BTW 2: More generally, I believe there is a pattern in Swedish where people, for a while, use the foreign word or term as is, and then sooner of later “Swedify” the term. Pretty sure that’s how the French lieutenant became the Swedish löjtnant; how the German Schnellzug became the Swedish snälltåg; and how the (American) English special effects became specialeffekter.
Which also begs the question why this is the case. One would probably have to carefully study the credits of Swedish movies which were produced in the late 70s and since then.
There is an entry for Bengt Lundgren on IMDB:
He is credited as an electrician for most productions he participated in, but occasionally also as grip, gaffer and only once for “special effects” (namely in Fanny and Alexander in 1982).
And this seems perfectly plausible, BTW.
That’s a general pattern with loanwords, in all languages. Often but not always the pronunciation changes first (simply because the borrowing language doesn’t include some of the phonemes of the original), then the spelling does.
Okay so I was reading along in here and came across this post, which made me laugh at the “Swedify” thing. And so I emailed a friend of mine in Sweden, pointing her to this thread and to this comment in particular. Here’s her response:
So there ya have it- Steken’s got it. 
I vaguely recall a few Bergman films where someone was credited in English as “Script Girl.”
Thanks for the info everybody.
I kind of thought it would be like someone painted a Trompe-l’œil in an
English language film and would be listed as the Trompe-l’œil painter
instead of the deceive the eye painter.