Carried Over in the Dark: Subtitles and Parallel Worlds
/ Article by Joses Ho
Early on in Marvel’s latest tentpole feature Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, I found myself wincing in the dark of the cinema hall.
The scene in question happens when the titular character is heading to his friend Katy’s house for breakfast. Katy’s grandmother is preparing paper offerings for her late husband as Qingming is approaching; she explains to Shang-Chi that her husband enjoyed baijiu, which she was including in these offerings.
This entire conversation happens in Chinese, with the subtitles translating baijiu as “whiskey”: the former is a clear spirit, the latter isn’t. Qingming is translated as “Day of the Dead”, conflating the Mexican and East Asian festivals that honour the departed. For that scene, hearing the Chinese dialogue and reading the English subtitles at the same time made me mutely disappointed.
Elsewhere in Shang-Chi, the subtitles reveal how idiomatic Chinese phrases can be difficult to translate, at least in the context of a superhero movie. At one point, Shang-Chi’s father tells another character “我吃的盐比你吃的饭多¹”, which literally translates as “I’ve had more salt than you have had rice”. In Chinese, this is a well-worn way for an older person to assert that they have more life experience and thus should be respected or listened to. In Shang-Chi, this is subtitled in English as “I’ve lived ten of your lifetimes, young man.” One could argue that a literal translation here would leave viewers who lack the cultural context or knowledge scratching their heads.
In translation theory, this approach is known as dynamic equivalence. Instead of aiming for a literal word-for-word translation, the translator instead attempts to reproduce for the non-speaker the impression native speakers would have gotten.
Indeed, ticket-toting patrons do not want to keep referring to a dictionary or Wikipedia to have to unpack every single subtext whilst following the plot.
Contrast this with another film set in East Asia. In Bong Joon-Ho’s critically-acclaimed and award-winning Parasite, the English subtitles at several points do not literally translate the Korean dialogue as well². Notably, a housekeeper is asked to prepare a dish called jjapaguri, which is translated instead as ram-don, a portmanteau of ramyeon (which is what Koreans call ramen) and udon, the two types of instant noodles used in jjapaguri.
I wonder if we could conceive of a film’s dialogue and accompanying subtitles as parallel worlds. The same characters live and die and fall in love in mostly the same ways; yet certain words exist in one but not in the other, or have a particular shade of meaning in one world but not the other. The word ram-don does not exist in the dialogue-world of Parasite, but it does in the subtitle-world of Parasite. In the dialogue-world of Shang-Chi, Katy’s grandmother offers her late husband baijiu on Qingming, while in the subtitle-world, it’s Scotch on Día de Muertos.
For every film, there’s a subtitle-world created for a specific audience who can’t survive in its dialogue-world. Any differences between the two would only be discernible to multilingual audiences.
So being multilingual is a super-power, allowing one to simultaneously exist across dialogue-world and subtitle-world for the duration of the film. The word translation comes from the Latin, and means “to carry across”. Film subtitlers, then, are subtitle-mirrorworld builders, as well as their guides across the borders. World-building is hard, even if you’re mostly copying from your own notes. Parasite director Bong, notably, works on his own translations alongside a professional. He has called crafting subtitles for Parasite “a lot of work1”.
Cross-border journeys can be rocky. Living in two parallel worlds at the same time can be hazardous to health (or at least one’s film-viewing experience). Shang-Chi left me grimacing in certain spots. But crossing the border can literally expand a horizon. The original depth and meaning of a film’s dialogue might only ever be privy to those who speak the language, but with cinematic discourse moving online, the barriers to glimpsing the dialogue-world are coming down slowly. Indeed, for both Parasite and Shang-Chi, there are Reddit threads³ alongside full-length published articles discussing dialogue-subtitle discrepancies: clues to another world that we can follow.
Subtitle-worlds are built for those who can’t live in dialogue-world. But dialogue-world came first, and was built for those who love cinema as much as its creators. I watched Shang-Chi together with friends who did not speak Chinese. Subtitle-world and dialogue-world converged to transport all of us into a shared cinematic space. We were all smiling and laughing and crying together in the dark.
NOTES
¹ The actual idiom should be 我吃的盐比你吃的米多, where 米 refers to uncooked rice whilst 饭 is cooked rice. So technically Shang-Chi’s dialogue got it wrong as well, but unpacking the misuse in a Marvel film is beyond the specific scope of this piece.
² For further reading material, please refer to this Polygon article by Karen Han, and this Gen piece by Su Cho.
³ This Reddit thread is an example of how online discourse can bridge dialogue-world and subtitle-world.