How Subtitles and Translators Are Evolving Asian Cinema
This year was huge for Asian representation in American cinema, though the cultural bang created by Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, a celebration of diaspora narrative, has finally faded. So, let’s talk about a couple of gems from Asian cinema, lest this underdog Hollywood success story from A24 overshadow the brilliance of movies actually made on the continent.
Bong Joon-ho, the Asian director of another Academy Award winner, Parasite, once famously described the Oscars as “local,” hinting at its limitations and bias. He went on to assert his call for diversity during his own Oscars acceptance speech, asking audiences to “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” to discover cinematic works in languages other than English. Using the services of a translator, his words marked a moment in the cultural consciousness waking up to non-English narratives. EEAAO itself weaves in multiple languages through its deep dive into multiverses, using different Chinese dialects, and cleverly employing silence and subtitles in text bubbles in the film’s famous world-building sequence for the Rock World.
German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt believed that “every language contains a unique world outlook” – this would imply the very use of multiple languages in films itself is the construction of a multiverse.
Subtitles have always been an essential feature of the movie-watching experience for non-native English speakers of Asia. Unlike dubbed versions of films, they still keep the auditory integrity of the movie intact. The range of languages (over 2,000) across the vast geographical area of Asia is a propellant to this diversity in story-telling, challenging all homogenised categorisations and monolithic representations.
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We can easily trace the changes in the nature of narratives that come into play when plotlines lean in heavily on subtitles and translators, notably in two movies that have lead nominations at the Asian Film Awards this year: South Korean auteur Park Chan Wook's Decision to Leave and Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Harumichi's Drive My Car. Subtitles and translators (both AI and manual) are used heavily in both films, creating an expansion of cinematic story-telling.
In Decision to Leave, Park Chan Wook cleverly uses the many of pitfalls and prospects of translations. The film is a Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse romantic thriller following Jang Hae-Jun, a Korean detective investigating the death of a retired immigration officer in a mountaineering accident, and the prime suspect of the case, Song Seo-Rae, the mysterious Chinese immigrant widow of the dead man. In the very first interaction between the leading characters, Seo-Rae uses her smartphone to translate a Chinese proverb for the detective to express her dislike of mountains and love for sea—a major metaphor of the film’s visual poetics. As feelings develop between them, Seo-Rae’s use of a dated form of Korean, learnt from watching Sageuk (period drama) becomes an inside joke during their flirtatious conversations.
Interpreting this constant flux in the way characters speak to each other, the film’s translator Darcy Paquet writes: “All subtitle translation involves a high degree of compromise, since the text flashes so briefly on the screen. Inevitably some nuance or shade of meaning must be jettisoned in order to give the viewer enough time to read.” Yet, these disconnections and miscommunications only add layers onto the narrative, waiting for a cinema lover to come back to it again and again, uncovering new meanings with each viewing.
“The usual barriers of language are continually challenged in the day to day lives of characters of these films as technology permeates the very fabric of human existence, impacting cinematic commentary on contemporary social and personal stories of grief, gender, disability, and migration.”
An adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women, Drive My Car is a more overt exploration of this phenomenon. Yusuke Kafuku, the protagonist, a theatre actor and director, stages multilingual adaptations of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and most prominently, Chekov’s Uncle Vanya in the movie. Grieving the death of his daughter, and later, his wife, Kafuku’s personal life and miseries bleed into his artistic expressions and creative practices. The characters in the movie, as well as in the story within the story, speak in different languages portraying the very vantage points that evolve when audiences try to overcome language barriers.
This unique and experimental approach to old classics in Kafuku’s plays requires subtitles to be projected behind the stage, putting the double vision of the audience (required for processing text and images simultaneously) and their understanding of auditory signals on screen. The meta-narrative style pushes the limits of language, building a cinematic vocabulary of Japanese, Korean, English, Mandarin, Tagalog, Indonesian, German, and Malaysian.
In one of the film’s most emotionally moving scenes, a mute actress in his cast uses Korean Sign Language to deliver her final monologue onstage – it is a perfect example of how each language can open up new doors of perception.
The common connection between these films points to a new way for exploring the diversity of experiences in the Asian continent, while highlighting the universality of the human condition. Also, the contextual and cultural implications of subtitle use in these films reflects contemporary Asia, changing with global technology while transcending cultural barriers by bridging different languages.
The multiple point of view that come with multiple languages can shape narratives and create a medium to showcase diversity in Asian cinema. The usual barriers of language are continually challenged in the day to day lives of characters of these films as technology permeates the very fabric of human existence, impacting cinematic commentary on contemporary social and personal stories of grief, gender, disability, and migration. But while translators and subtitles have a major role in shaping the eventual polyphonic perspectives of these films, whether this evolution will finally lay waste to western cinema’s Tower of Babel or not is yet to be seen.
Words: Sudeshna Rana
