Herman G. Weinberg

Biography

Herman G. Weinberg was an American subtitler, film journalist, film historian, and biographer. He pioneered the use of English subtitles for foreign films, starting in the early 1930s and continuing until his retirement in the 1960s. He is estimated to have single-handedly written the English subtitles for more than 300 foreign films, including many classics. Weinberg felt obliged to study as many languages as possible for his translations, though these translations have been criticized as overly literal in nature. He was unfamiliar with several figures of speech. He translated film dialogues and other texts from (among other languages) Czech, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. As a biographer, his written works mostly focused on the lives of Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg and Erich von Stroheim.