Scaling the "one-inch tall barrier": translating figurative language for subtitles presents some unique challenges
(No Squid Game spoilers in the comments please, I've still not seen it)
The number of us using streaming platforms has exploded over the last decade, and as their popularity continues to grow, the sentiment of Joon-Ho's claim is resonating with viewers across the world more, and more. Literally thousands of films, box-sets, animated pictures that have been written, produced and initially released in countries on the other side of the globe are readily available to consumers basically everywhere.
As anyone who has recently binge-watched Squid Game on Netflix will tell you, this new way of consuming visual media means we can easily enjoy top-class art made by international talent, that we would otherwise likely never have even heard of. But for me, it's really interesting how most of us seem blissfully unaware of a caveat that accompanies all this, and that's the reliance on subtitles. And whilst I'd never wish to question Joon-Ho's mastery over filmmaking, I think he's downplaying the unique but sizeable challenges that 'one-inch tall barrier' can present.
Subtitles - English [CC]✔
On paper, subtitles themselves can and often do work perfectly fine, even in this international context. That's because, despite what certain breeds of "political commentators" will have you believe, intercultural communication is not inherently problematic. Writing subtitles, dubbing scripts and closed captions for media that play a crucial role in cross-cultural interaction (Blum-Kulka & Olsthain, 1984); they facilitate a type of relationship between the viewer and the creatives behind a Netflix show, who likely have cultural identities that are quite different from one another.
When we are looking at how well people with different cultural backgrounds can consume audiovisual media, the biggest hurdles are often presented by the working practices of the industry more broadly.
The effects of the "talent crunch" are being felt in full force
- space: the viewer isn't going to be able to digest massive paragraphs in one go; ideally, subtitles should only be featured at about a sentence at a time
- time: most lines of dialogue last between one and six seconds, so subtitlers have to make sure their transcriptions can be read in the target language in roughly the amount of time it takes the person on screen to say it
- presentation: subtitles shouldn't take up more than 20% of the screen, as not to disrupt the viewing experience, but also need to be the right size and typeface if they're going to be legible to you or me at home.
Cross-cultural communication is really quite complex
Learning a new language is more complicated than just cramming-in the exact translation for each word you already know and remembering the correct way to reorder the parts of your sentence. Languages don't map that neatly onto each other. Instead, you'll soon discover that you're regularly encountering words or phrases that embody a concept, which represents a key part of the cultural values of the native speakers, that just can't be conveyed using a word or two in your mother tongue.
'It's raining cats and dogs' doesn't work the same way in Urdu
Let's talk figurative language. Imagery, personification, metaphor all draw on a shared understanding of members belonging to the same culture, that often don't exist in the same way elsewhere.
It could be argued, for example, that idioms help make up cultural-scripts, defined as "tacit norms, values and practices widely shared, and widely known (on an intuitive level) in a given society." (Wierzbicka, 2010) Idioms and other sayings commonplace in the speech-routines of members of the same culture, even though their grammatical salience is often questionable, and regularly refer to things that just aren't true in the real world. Ask a robot if they were 'in the know' as to whether or not they had a 'sweet tooth', and they might just blow a fuse; grammatically and factually these idioms are nonsense, but native English speakers wouldn't bat an eyelid if they cropped up in a conversation.
As such, if a subtitler wasn't privy to the meaning of an idiom that appeared in a line of dialogue and instead translated it word-for-word, or wasn't aware of a similar one that would work in that context, we would likely see a cross-cultural mishap that leaves the target audience feeling baffled.
(Kontenytė, 2016) found that more often than not, translators just chose to omit idioms that appear in dialogue, and instead opt for a variety of techniques to substitute the meaning (in the table extract below, ST is the original language, TT the subtitles).
What does this all mean?
Writing interlingual subtitles relies on the subtitler understanding how screenwriters originally meant for their words to be consumed, but also on their ability to effectively draw on cultural norms and scripts in the target language. This way, they can best co-construct this intercultural experience between themselves, the audience, and the creative talent behind the scenes.
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