Cantonese and subtitles

I was trying to watch a movie this evening. By watch I mean use as background noise while I wrote papers. Ideally then it would be in English. Looking for “Shanghai” with Gong Li and John Cusack, I was stuck with the Mandarin dubbed version. That’s 谍海风云 dié hǎi fēngyún for anyone interested.

There are a few things you’ll find when browsing the videos available on Youku, Tudou, 56 or whathaveyou. First, when dealing with the spoken language, Mandarin is called 国语 over 中文 or 汉语 by a large margin. A quick few searches on Tudou returns these numbers (Thits?):

国语 >355,000
中文 >160,000
汉语 <4,000

Then, there are different ‘standard’ ‘codes’ for the written subtitles. Most are pretty these should be obvious.

中 Mandarin
粤 Cantonese
泰 Thai
韩 Korean
日 Japanese
英 English

So then 国语中字 is a movie in Mandarin, dubbed or not, with Mandarin subtitles. 英语双字 or some version of it containing 英 and 中 has subtitles in English and Mandarin and the audio is English.

Most of this stuff is common knowledge, but in case any readers aren’t video site regulars, maybe it will be of some use.

The thing that I was noticing though as I searched for something to watch was that a number of movies are in Cantonese but with Mandarin subtitles. Some say 粤字 but it’s a lie. The subtitles are still in Mandarin. This really isn’t just about movies though. It’s one more way that Mandarin is apparent as the written language regardless of what people are actually speaking. Videos with audio in Wu will still have the subtitles in Mandarin. An exception is the local Changzhou show 生活365 which has subtitles in Changzhou Wu that match the audio. Short of specialty shows like this though, you’re not likely to be reading the language that’s being spoken outside of Mandarin films.

Actually there is one more ubiquitous exception. KTV, as karaoke is known here, has a large number of songs in Cantonese. Beyond will always be well represented, for example. They sing in Cantonese and the subtitles will obviously be faithful to the words being sung.

Truth be told most of the claims of subtitles on those video sites are lies anyway. It’s usually just 国语中字 regardless of what they may otherwise claim.

12 responses to “Cantonese and subtitles”

  1. Claw says:

    I can’t think of any specific examples right now, but I have seen Cantonese movies with true Cantonese subtitles in the past. You are right though; the vast majority appear to be Cantonese with Mandarin subtitles.

    • Tubie51 says:

      But isn’t written Chinese the same meaning regardless of whether it is pronounced Mandarin or Cantonese style? Are you referring to transliteration? Thank you for the Chinese characters though, I can’t read much.

      • Yhìlam says:

        Absolutely not. The written standard is Mandarin, even in Cantonese speaking areas. However there is such a thing as written Cantonese, which varies by character as well as in grammar and lexicon. It’s a bit of a widespread myth that all Chinese languages are really just variant pronunciations of a single form, but this isn’t at all the actual situation.

        Buy a newspaper in Guangzhou and it’s going to be written in Mandarin, not Cantonese, except in rare cases. This was true even before the immediate past.

  2. They no doubt exist. And there are examples beyond the two I gave near the end. Though I find it peculiar that most are Mandarin written over Yue. Peculiar, but not surprising.

  3. Claw says:

    There’s a sociolinguistic aspect to it. The first thing that comes to mind for many Cantonese speakers when they see written Cantonese for anything more than short notes is “why would you write like that?” It’s not standardized nor taught so some people view it as harder to read, despite the fact that it represents their native tongue better. Written Cantonese has become more widely accepted in recent years though, probably due to the rise of Internet message boards.

  4. Chris Waugh says:

    Back in the day when KTV catalogues were gigantic books, I remember seeing some with Mandarin, Cantonese, and Fujian (presumably Minnan) sections. Never having been to KTV with Cantonese or Minnan speakers, I never found out whether the subtitles for the songs in the Cantonese and Minnan sections were written in those languages or not.

    One thing that does puzzle me about subtitles, in both KTV and films, is the preponderance of trad characters – with the exception, of course, of TV or movie theatres, but certainly on a lot of pirated VCDs (yes, I am getting old) and DVDs.

  5. There’s a sociolinguistic aspect to it.

    Oh of course. It’s the same battle I’ve been having for the last two years in researching written Wu.

    KTV songs in Cantonese have subtitles in Cantonese, at least in my experience. But I only know this from a few more popular songs that friends have chosen. For movie subtitles, I blame the Triads.

  6. dlszho says:

    The “Mandarin” text used in Hong Kong movie subtitles are often marked with Hong Kong-specific words and styles. And I suppose (at least in the past before DVDs with multi-track dubbing) that having general Chinese subtitles allows for a greater audience. I’ve read somewhere that there was a law passed in 1963 that required subtitling in English at least, and studios put in the Chinese as well, since English is required.

    What I continue to be uncomfortable about is calling the text “Mandarin”. While I think the text can be read as “Mandarin” (by Mandarin speakers), if you look at how the texts are used and performed in Hong Kong Cantonese, isn’t it more accurate to call this “Mandarin” text an acrolectic version of Cantonese (though heavily influenced by Mandarin)?

    I mean, when Cantonese speakers read a newspaper text in “Mandarin” out loud—it’s NOT in Mandarin at all, but pronounced in Cantonese. If you look at the oral reproduction of these texts, it’s Cantonese–not the colloquial, but an acrolect, a high variety, highly influenced by Mandarin. And this level of language is not just written; it is recited in class, in the education system. And there is slightly less stiff variety that substitutes a few Cantonese words (the pronouns, the particles etc) into this Mandarinized variety. In other words, a spectrum.

    If the study of language is to focus on speech, we need to take into consideration different levels of speech. After all, you can’t expect to speak the exact same way in a lecture hall and in a pool hall.

    I want to reiterate here that I DO think Cantonese and Mandarin are different languages for all intents and purposes (for example, it is just about impossible for communication to happen between a Cantonese speaker and a Mandarin speaker who both have no previous knowledge of the other language). What I mean is that the Mandarin/Mandarinized formal variety (in the case of Hong Kong) is spoken in specific, restricted contexts, and what’s more, spoken not in any pronunciation recognizable to Mandarin speakers, but uttered in Cantonese pronunciation.

    Perhaps this is a little similar to the Sanskrit-Hindi and Persian-Urdu continuum.

  7. Hindi is closer to Urdu than Persian. Sanskrit is ultimately a dead language that is ancestral to Hindi et al and isn’t really spoken anymore. So you can’t really have a Sanskrit-Hindi continuum unless you’re looking at historical linguistics.

    But yeah otherwise I’m in agreement.

  8. Brendan says:

    I’m curious about the translation of Shanghai, as I was involved with it — they gave me a draft translation into Chinese done by a native speaker, and had me go over it to double-check and make corrections. I made a fair number of changes, and would be curious to see how or whether they were incorporated.

  9. Ty Lim says:

    As for Teochew (a Minnan language), the karaoke (the little that there is) is subtitled to match what folks actually say but the characters chosen tend to either use all Mandarin equivalents (meaning) or use Mandarin for their sound values, as is done on Teochew messageboards. As for Teochew movies, almost ways Mandarin – which annoys me to no end because I am someone trying to learn Teochew and there are tons of words that are just left out of the translation I’m sure.

  10. Claw says:

    I meant to add a relevant observation to this thread a while back, but got busy and ended up forgetting to do so.

    Anyway, I was flying Cathay Pacific from Hong Kong back to the United States a few months ago. As the plane was descending, they played a video from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security describing the procedures for getting through customs. The audio was in English, but I was surprised to see that the subtitles were all in Written Cantonese, rather than Standard (Mandarin) Chinese. Cathay Pacific is a Hong Kong-based airline, but even in Hong Kong, anything remotely official would generally be written using Standard Chinese. I wonder whether any of the Mandarin speakers on the flight were baffled.

    I should have snapped a picture of the video with the subtitles, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me to do so at the time.

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