Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
I had two interesting subtitle experiences recently.
The first was while watching a making-of documentary about Wong Kar Wai’s movie, In the Mood for Love. (Which is, for the record, amazingly good.) (And also I got for only $15 at Half Price Books which is a great deal for a 2-disc Criterion edition movie.) (Anyhow.) On this documentary they’re interviewing on of the actors in the piece, who happened also to be the prop master. In an interview he says (or rather, he said some stuff in Chinese and the subtitles read):
“I was the prop master. That means that I am in charge of all the props.”
My second encounter was in Kurosawa’s Stray Dog. This movie was in Japanese and the following exchange occurred (paraphrased):
“You’ll want to see a gun dealer.”
“What’s that?”
“A person who sells guns.”
Both of these examples serve to illustrate the difficulty in translating idiom and slang. I’m sure in Chinese, the term for “prop manager” in no way inherently tells you that it’s a person who manages props, and similarly the Japanese term for a gun dealer gives no clues to its actual meaning. However, there’s no other option open to the translator when translating these terms, and then the next few lines are unavoidably confusing. For an example in English, the head electrician on a movie set is known as the “gaffer”; his head assistant is called the “best boy”. If someone were to translate that previous sentence into another language, you can surely see how a similar piece of confusion may arise.
I actually just remembered another example, that I noticed as a young child watching some black & white Japanese monster movie on Sunday afternoon TV one day. I forget the name of the movie (some internet searching leads to believe that it may have been Son of Godzilla, but I can’t be sure), but it was about a group of Japanese scientists on an island filled with giant insects. At one point, while observing some giant mantises, one scientist says to the other (again, paraphrased):
“Johnson’s been calling them ‘giant mantises’. He came up with that term by combining the words ‘giant’ and ‘mantis’.”
“That Johnson’s a whiz with language!”
The memory’s stuck with me because it seemed so strange to me at the time, but of course I understand now what was going on.