Why I am a Subtitle Snob
By Guest Blogger: Justin Margulski
Gandahar Movie Poster
The other day I was watching Light Years, one of my favorite cartoon movies, and it occurred to me that I have become a subtitle snob.
I wasn’t always a subtitle snob. Once, I could watch foreign movies with English speaking voices dubbed over the foreign footage, and if the translation was decent, and the voice acting good, I would genuinely enjoy myself. But recently, more and more, I find myself wanting to hear the foreign dialog.
Light Years is the English language version of the film Gandahar, by René Laloux. Light Years is noteworthy in that it is the only time I have heard Teller’s voice (from Penn and Teller; I still haven’t seen Spanking Lessons).
The film takes place in a land called Gandahar. (No mention is made of the rest of Afghanistan, so it may just be another place with the same name, you know, like Georgia, just north of Florida, and Georgia, just north of Turkey.) In the film, there is no mention of any astronomical units at all, certainly not light years. There are also several scenes cut from the English version. But let’s leave all that aside.
The reasons I like the French version better are linguistic. In French, the ocean that the hero has to traverse is called “L’Océan Excentrique”. In English it is called the “Circumscribing Ocean”, because, unfortunately, the English word “eccentric” has lost its original meaning: “ex” – away from, “centric”, that which lies in the center. So they had to use the word, “circumscribing”. But in French, “excentrique” still retains that meaning, as well as having the meaning we have in English, odd, unusual, and perhaps foreign. I know it’s a simple change, and it is snobbish for it to bother me, but the French word means so much more than the English word.
And there is another reason. The mutants in the film have an unusual way of speaking. They never say something “is”. They always say something “was-will be”. In English it gets on my nerves, because “was” is one word and “will be” is two words so it sounds horribly awkward. I’m sure it sounds weird in French for the mutant guy to find the hero and say, “il était sera de Gandahar.” But in French the word for “was” is “était”, and the word for “will be” is “sera”. So each is one word, and it flows and sounds better to me.
I know. I’m a snob for letting it upset me, especially when Christopher Plummer kicks butt as the Metamorphis. Georges Wilson in the French version is good, but he is certainly not Christopher Plummer. But there is it. It upsets me, and that makes me a bit of a subtitle snob.
And another example:
The last time I visited my mum, we watched a Japanese cartoon called DNAngel. There was one episode in which the high school boy, Daiské coaxes a magical bunny, Wiz to transform into a copy of him. Once Wiz looks exactly like Daiské, Daiské repeats his name to the polymorphic bunny. In the English dub I watched with my mum, the bunny then says something along the lines of “I like you.” It’s kind of weird and cute that Wiz can say nothing else, and hilarity ensues.
In the Japanese version Daiské repeats his name to Wiz and Wiz repeats it back, but the bunny cannot quite manage to say Daiské’s name properly. Instead, Wiz says “daiski”. Now, I don’t speak Japanese, but… (Actually, my friends would say that I do speak Japanese, so I’ll meet them halfway.) Now, I barely speak Japanese, but I know what the word “daiski” means, “dai” – great, “suki” – affection. Because of the way Japanese grammar works you really don’t need to say anything else to mean, “I love you,” or “I love it,” or “That girl is crushing really hard on that guy.” People tend to understand based on what they were already talking about or where you were looking or what was going on when you said it.
Obviously “daiski” is very different from “I like you”. But the biggest difference is that I did not laugh at all when I heard the dialog in English, and I nearly laughed my popcorn right out of my mouth when I heard it in Japanese. In Japanese it’s a really funny joke, and in English the joke doesn’t work at all. My mum and I didn’t notice it was a joke, and simply moved on with the episode. Oh and in the Japanese dialog, when he says “daiski” to a girl there is this moment when she freezes, terrified because he might not just be complementing her apron, he might be confessing his love for her, and of course, the funny ambiguity was totally taken out of the English version.
There’s got to be hoards of these things. I’ve noticed that kung fu movies are full of them, weird little Chinese figures of speech that don’t translate, but mean a lot.
Because I don’t want to feel like some fussy elitist, please, everyone, add your own comments of things that got lost in translation, things that you would never notice if you were watching a dubbed version, but that you can still catch in the subtitled version even if you don’t speak the language particularly well.
Kemba Johnson is Creative Director/ Owner of Kemba Celebrations, an invitation and design studio. With her husband Justin Margulski, she creates unique, modern and handmade designs based on cultures and themes. 