Avatar
I’ve just been to see Avatar in all its nauseating 3-D glory. I’ll spare the review at this stage, but something caught my ear.
For anyone familiar with the film, I apologise for the following description.
At some point, in the first half of the story, on an alien world, an interloper (American, would you believe) encounters a bunch of locals (aliens, no less). Now the aliens have their own alien language (helpfully subtitled) and wouldn’t be expected to speak English, but then one of them addresses the interloper in English. A surprised interloper turns around and asks:
“Where did you learn to speak English?”
Or at least, that’s probably what happens. I was watching a Chinese-dubbed version. And that changes the experience considerably. If you’ll forgive the lack of precision in recalling the exact quotation, it was something along the lines of:
“你的英语是从哪儿学来的？”
Now that struck me as odd. Here I was, listening to one creature addressing another creature in Chinese, only to be met with a question about his speaking English. Surely, as one creature was, in this version of the film, speaking Chinese and was surprised to meet an alien with whom he could converse in Chinese, it would have been more appropriate to ask how the alien came to speak Chinese.
Can anyone explain this to me?
The more I think about this, the more I get tied in knots. If the film was subtitled, rather than dubbed, I guess it would be natural to subtitle “你的英语…” because the viewer would be very much conscious that the language being spoken was not the language of the subtitles.
I’ve virtually no experience of watching dubbed films. I’d sooner have subtitles any day. But why would you not have the dubbed language completely assume the place of the original language of the film?
That’s not unusual with dubbed films. Here in Germany every foreign movie on television and in the cinema is dubbed and I’ve encountered the same thing more than once so I guess that’s how they do it.
I suspect it could be seen as a form of Translation Convention. I.E. the characters are actually speaking English, but all English is translated into Chinese for the aid of the local audience. This is often in less linguistically-savvy scifi flicks to allow aliens to be speaking English even among each other.
I’ve wondered about that before. We do the same thing in German. People encouraging people in German to please speak clear and simple English, and some such.
I believe it was a plain mistake. A nonsense.
It’s because white people can’t speak Chinese. Duh!
On an unrelated note: I saw a subtitled version of Avatar, and the Chinese subs had clearly been done very hastily. It actually did diminish my enjoyment of the film somewhat — or at the very least, it seemed to be a further reflection of my main complaint about it: all that money and all those thousands of man-hours spent on the special effects, and they couldn’t spare a little longer to work on the part of the movie that the special effects were supposedly in the service of.
Could we parallel “anachronism” and call this an analinguistic error, an analinguism?
Now that i think about it (Mandarin-speakers talking about learning to speak English), it kinda makes sense
given the audience’s presumed level of linguistic sophistication. GACC mentions “less savvy sci-fi”
but this happens in less savvy movies involving any sort of foreigners, e.g. cold war flicks where russians speak accented english. You could almost imagine in such a movie a scene where they commit a parallel analinguistic error.
Uh, just back from a google search and, well: don’t be as excited about “analinguism” as I was. The Urban Dictionary will inform you that some people prefer to take the first four letters as the key morpheme, which results in an entirely different take on the word.
I’m with GAC on this. It’s obvious that the characters in the movie are Americans and are all speaking English. We do the same thing in our movies, including the ones we dub from other languages. It would be really strange if you were watching a dubbed Japanese film and the characters were commenting on their English accents.
If the audience believes the characters are speaking Chinese, then the translation is misleading. But assuming the audience believe the characters are speaking English, and are being dubbed into Chinese, the translation makes complete sense.
Also: what if in the film there were two Chinese scientists and at one point they spoke to each other in Chinese, so the rest of the (English-speaking) scientists couldn’t understand. Surely you wouldn’t want their peeved colleagues to say: “stop speaking in English, why can’t you use Chinese like the rest of us?” to them?
“but this happens in less savvy movies involving any sort of foreigners, e.g. cold war flicks where russians speak accented english.”
There is the opening scene in Zhang Yimou’s 《三枪》 in which conversation with the Persian merchant happens in English, but I suspect that’s more a deliberate pisstake than lack of savvy.
Hmm, looks like there’s not much sympathy here. At least Shuwei thought it was not quite right. I’m interested to hear that it’s the norm in Germany.
Not being a great movie-goer, I guess I’ve been a bit sheltered. I should try to get out more. At least, when I do, I’ll be better prepared thanks to GAC’s link to TV Tropes.
Brendan, I couldn’t agree more about the value of a quality translation, but do you think many people really care? It’s not as though many regular Chinese movie-goers are likely to make their decision on whether or not to go and see the latest Holywood blockbuster based on the reported quality of the dubbing, is it? I’d like to think that a great Chinese film, translated into English very badly, would bomb in the UK or US, solely on the grounds of the translation. If that’s the case, I suspect it may, in part, be due to the market for translated movies being largely restricted to a section of the population which places a high value on language.
I still find this “你的英语…” a little odd, even if I’m beginning to come round. If I’ve suspended my disbelief sufficiently to accept that this group of Japanese (or whatever) characters are speaking English, why is it so hard for me to accept them referring to that language as English? I’m not saying that there’s nothing odd about such a situation, but still question how it is we can so easily accept that the information coming into our ears is English, but our eyes won’t permit us to accept its being referred to as such.
I quite like RM’s example, and there are probably further possibilities for language combinations and situations which might get me into an even greater tangle, but even if we had Chinese as the ‘foreign’ language in an English-language movie, why shouldn’t the Chinese-dubbed version of the film use English, or German, or even another Chinese dialect as the ‘foreign’ language?
The one potential problem here is if the geographic location, nationality, or particular spoken language is crucial to the plot. Supposing we had a film set during the Second World War in occupied China, featuring a Japanese solder who switched sides, learnt Chinese and helped free China from occupation. If that film were to be translated into English…what was I saying about suspending disbelief?
OK, last attempt to save some face here. Despite my reference to Americans in the original post, I don’t recall the origins of the interlopers in Avatar ever being mentioned, beyond reference to Earth. (Please to let me know if this is not the case.) So why could ‘English’ not simply have been translated as ‘our language’, ‘your language’, or whatever?
Maybe I should just settle for Luis’ answer:
I’ve seen this done with Arab language movies as well. Never sat right with me.
My suspension of disbelief can accept that Joaquin Phoenix is fluent in Mandarin. But not if you keep telling me he’s not.
I’m not an expert, but I think the norm in Germany is just to translate what people say, and not try to adjust the content relative to the dubbed language.
BTW, many American movies are quite annoying to watch in German, because at least most war movies feature German at some points. Think: A says to B something in German. C says to D “Goddamn Krauts! I can’t understand a word”, also in German. Or humor, like in Hogan’s Heroes (?), or American Dad (with the German fish) gets totally lost.. it’s just not possible to make a German accent sound funny, when all the characters are speaking German 😐
In fact, I have more than once heard the not very idiomatic translation “Where did you learn to speak our language?” in German dubbed versions. Personally, I have an aversion against the nationalistic use of “our” (as in “我國”). But in this case the plural would sound even weirder because the American interloper is alone among the aliens.
I saw it in a cinema with Chinese subtitles. When the aliens spoke in their native language the Chinese subtitles continued but there were no English subtitles. I wondered at the time whether or not there had been English subtitles in the original, which had been translated, or whether the subtitle writers had taken it upon themselves to make up a translation. They didn’t really seem necessary, in any case… pretty much everything they said was fairly obvious from the context.
Max,
Much sympathy with the war films!
Georg,
Agreed, it could be a little clumsy. And I wasn’t certain he was on his own at that point. I wonder whether anyone can think of an elegant solution?
Btw, have you tried using 我国 to refer to your own country?
While on the topic of subtitles, I was watching a movie (the Kingdom, maybe) that took place in Saudi Arabia. It was all English with Mandarin subtitles, unless they were speaking Arabic in which case no subtitles, but instead dubbed into Russian.
That pretty much sums up my DVD buying experiences in China.
Sima: I’ll give 我国 a shot, but I imagine it will be a lot like when my flatmate talks on the phone to her friend who’s living in America but still calling all the Americans 老外. So I fully expect to get called out on 我国.