Subtitles and noir...and shameless self-promotion

[Mark Nornes]

On May 12, 2008, at 11:21 AM, Aaron Gerow wrote:

> Two articles from Japan Today, one on problems of subtitling ......
> http://www.japantoday.com/category/kuchikomi/view/what-are-nazis-todays-kids-cant-handle-movie-subtitles

This history is rather sketchy. The first subtitles were indeed,  
Morocco. But the reason for becomming a subtitling country was a  
little more complex. Warners introduced dubbing a bit after the first  
subtitled films, and made this a big part of their advertising. They  
even took out ads in the magazines teasing people a few months  
beforehand. But the dubbing job was produced by a Nikkei USC professor— 
in other words, by whoever they could find in LA. And he used local  
"talent," all of whom were from Hiroshima. Critics and audiences  
couldn't handle Hollywood actors speaking in Hiroshima-ben, so the  
experiment failed. This is the conventional telling of the story, and  
I haven't seen anything that suggests that's not accurate.

I haven't heard about the pressure to dumb down subtitles more than  
their current junior high school Japanese level. But I can't say I'm  
surprised. Dubbing and subtitling is the domain of distributors and  
producers, and so they want to cast the widest of nets. They'll winnow  
out as many kanji, slow down the timing, and generally tweak their  
translations to accommodate the broadest audience (ie., most mass of  
markets) possible.

Frankly, if they are dumbing down the subtitles further, I'd take the  
dubbed version any day. This is speaking as someone who has worked  
hard at loving dubbing (you can see my struggle, and learn a lot more  
about the history of subtitling and dubbing in Japan, in the book I  
just put out, Cinema Babel).

Markus
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