Re: Criterion in September
In her own words (excerpts below): http://www.cgj.org/en/c/vol_10-4/title_01.htmlNEVER MORE THAN 80 LETTERS --By Linda Hoaglund
"In the six years since I began writing English subtitles for Japanese films, I have worked on over 80 films, from Fukasaku Kinji's raging yakuza films, to Miyazaki Hayao's elegantly complex animation, to the recent outpouring of independent films made by Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Kore-eda Hirokazu and Sakamoto Junji, among others. I render the dialogue of confused, angry, willful, and mischievous characters into a series of individual subtitles, always less than 80 letters long.
"For me, the process of translating and condensing Japanese dialogue into English is visceral. I experience the character's emotions in Japanese, but express them in English, two languages that could not be more disparate. While Americans find Japanese expressions vague, Japanese find English unforgiving. In Japanese, subject is largely absent, tense often irrelevant. A subject's gender may go unmentioned for whole sentences, and contradictory tenses coexist in a single paragraph. Social interactions are assumed to be so transparent as to forgo fundamental Western linguistic references. The infinitive form of the verb "to go" constitutes a complete sentence, variously meaning "I'll go," "We'll go," "They'll go," "Will I go? "Will you go? "Will they go?"
"In creating characters and setting tone, not to mention conveying humor, I stray brazenly from literal translation. My goal is to reproduce the Japanese experience of film as faithfully as possible by not bogging down a Western audience with unfamiliar locutions."
