I saw a movie named Fur : An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus yesterday. It was a movie about one photographer who found her identity through communicating with a man who has hypertrichosis. That man is described mysterious because he tries to hide himself from the society for avoiding discriminations. Diane, the main character, didn’t know what she want but after she met him, she changed greatly and finally found her identity as a photographer.
The movie was very fascinating and heart touching but one thing disturbed me very much throughout the movie. It was the subtitle that wives are speaking honorific to their husbands but no husbands do that. Why the subtitle translator translated like that?
Considering that it’s very recent movie the subtitle translator won’t be old fashioned person who insists wives have to use honorific to their husbands. In Korea, nowadays, wives don’t use honorific to their husbands unless they decided to use honorific to each other or they have great gap in age. Therefore I guess using honorific to husbands has intention.
Actually it’s very easy to find a clue of that intention through the movie. It’s social background is 1930s when social position of women was much lower than now. I guess the translator intended to reflect the low position of women in their couple relationship.
However, still I can’t accept that idea because there isn’t honorific in English like in Korean. I think there can be different culture of communicating in western countries that we don’t know and if there is, this kind of translating missed cultural differences.
I agree that by only wives using honorific, it could show us the situation very effectively; it’s very natural in Korean context. However, we have to be careful in understanding other culture because misunderstanding of culture can causes little or big problems.
That depends on how the husband treats his wife, I think. Maybe translator has no idea what he’s doing and probably we are too mus sensitive. However, I agree with your last words that misunderstanding can cause serious problems. That’s why we have to be careful when we translate foreign language, I guess.
Well, English doesn’t have explicit honorifics, but we do the same thing with our word choice and tone and more. But I’ve heard some subtitlers simply make wives speak with honorifics and husbands use banmal. That’s not cool, according to me anyway.
Have you ever considered re-subtitling a Korean drama with this kind of sexist dialogue in the opposite way? I mean, the husband is saying banmal, but you subtitle him using jondaemal, and the wife is speaking jondaemal but you subtitle her using banmal? That sounds like a fascinating art project, and something that could make people think about language, gender, equality, and assumptions. I’d love to see it.