The German in question IIRC saw the American about to shoot him on the steps earlier, after killing the Jewish soldier and his friend, cowering as he walked past. I got the idea he was mocking the American saying something like “he won’t shoot, I know him”. Unless of course I have him confused with someone else
Some Irish TV is like that. The channel TNaG does some fairly interesting history shows (that aren’t all about being speared/shot/enslaved by the fecking Brits ) with an awkward mix of Irish language and English language and subtitles.
When I saw The Killing Fields on tape, I thought one of the things that made it so terrifying was that they didn’t subtitle the soldiers. So, at least for someone who doesn’t speak the language, you see a bunch of scary guys running around screaming unintelligibly and killing people. Not that it would have been less gruesome if I’d known what they were saying, but it just added to the sense of being completely lost and at the mercy of people and events you can’t understand. I think subtitles would have taken something away. Has anyone seen it on DVD? Do they subtitle everyone?
Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy (a film I never hesitate to recommend) reenacts W.S. Gilbert’s fortuitous visit to the Japanese exhibition in Knightsbridge (South Kensington) in 1885. After partaking of green tea and observing a kendo match, Mr. Gilbert attends a play performed in Japanese (perhaps *Kabuki *or *Noh *-- I don’t know the difference). What is striking is that no subtitled translation is given, even though snippets of dialog given throughout the remainder of the film in French and German are routinely translated for the benefit of the Anglophonic audience.
The explanation for the “oversight”, I’m sure, is that the director wanted the audience of the film (the majority of whom would probably not speak Japanese) to feel something of the sense of cultural bewilderment that Mr. Gilbert was no doubt experiencing. A running translation given to the film’s audience would certainly undermine such an effort.
I’m pretty sure that the Kevin Costner version of No Way Out included some untranslated Russian in the beginning, and possibly some toward the end, to conceal Costner’s character’s identity as a Russian mole.
My DVD of Snatch has a “Pikey” option in the subtitles, that only comes on when Brad Pitt is talking - but I think there’s a few lines that don’t show up even in those subtitles.
I had the same confusing problem the first time I saw it. There are two guys. One that they capture when attacking the machinegun nest. When Giovanni Ribisi dies. Hanks lets him go despite the objections of his men. Later he is one of the guys that shot Hanks and Upham then shoots him after he gave up. The soldier the knifes Adam Goldberg while Upham is cowering is a different guy. We don’t see him again.
Really?? Damn, I thought those were the same guy; the first German soldier that had been released comes back and horribly kills one of the Americans that had earlier let him go.
I thought so too. I seem to recall reading that the first guy (the one Upham kills at the end) was an Eastern European conscript and the second guy is German.
The better cinemas in Bangkok will use both Thai and English subtitles for other languages. If it’s a third-language film, we always ask to make sure there are at least English subtitles.
Lost in Translation deliberately did not have subtitles to make the audience experience at least a little bit of the isolation and confusion of the characters. The dialog is real and believable Japanese, and yes, some of the information would make a difference in how you feel about the situation. Some people have criticized the scene,whose translated dialog was provided earlier, because they think a professional translator would be used.
Nope. A professional should be used, but often isn’t. A friend of mine — who is a native speaker of English and pretty fluent in Japanese, but not by any means a professional translator — was pressed into service by the prefectural government when there was a visit by the Danish royal family simply because he was available and “good enough.” When my school was hosting an exchange visit from Taiwan, a Taiwanese exchange student at a local university with halfway decent Japanese was asked to serve as a translator. That’s often the case, that anyone with halfway decent English is considered to be good enough to translate, even for fairly important events.
I haven’t seen Black Rain since I started learning Japanese, so I don’t remember what the dialog was like, but Rising Sun has a couple of lines that would be okay (though not all that important to know) if Connery’s accent wasn’t so horrible. Ando in Heroes is very hard to understand sometimes because of his accent, and though Hiro is obviously a native speaker, he has some odd word choices sometimes. He sounds like what he is; an expat native Japanese speaker who hasn’t spent much time in Japan since he was a kid. In general, the subtitles in Heroes are decent at showing information, though inevitably some tone gets lost along the way.
) with an awkward mix of Irish language and English language and subtitles.