Collaborative translation: an instrument for commercial success or neutralizing a feminist message?

ABSTRACT

This study examines the ways in which collaboration in audiovisual translation is approached and portrayed by different parties involved in the transnational distribution and consumption of cultural products. It considers the case of the Korean translation of Spy, an American action comedy spy film that was praised by many critics for its feminist message. Prior to its release in Korea, the film became widely known for its translators, which included a high-profile comedian, comedy scriptwriters, and a professional translator. Drawing on the concepts of ‘framing’ and ‘voice’, the present study shows how collaborative translation was used as a tool by the distributor to promote and market the film and to extend its commercial reach. The paper also argues that today’s viewers are not passive audiences. Empowered by social networks and digital devices, they actively share reviews and engage in discussions concerning translation method and quality, translators’ identities, and translation effects. Linking collaborative translation to what they see as the ‘flattening’ of a feminist voice and the insertion in the film of humor that reinforces unequal gender relations, many audiences actively resisted the distributor’s portrayal of collaborative translation as an optimal way to translate the film. The findings have implications for enhancing our understanding of collaborative translation work, translation of humor within the Korean cultural context, and perceptions on the connection between translation quality and collaborative translation.

KEYWORDS:

• Subtitling
• collaborative translation
• audiovisual translation (AVT)
• film audience
• framing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ji-Hae Kang is Professor of Translation Studies at the Department of English Language Literature and Director of Ajou Center for Translation and Interpreting Studies (ACTIS) at Ajou University, Republic of Korea. Her research focuses on institutional translation, the role of translation in the production, circulation and reception of academic knowledge, and issues of power, identity and discourse in transnational exchanges. Other interests include translation-related activities in transnational fandom and social, political, and ethical consequences of the development of digital technology with respect to translation. She is the author of Thongyekuy Ihay [Understanding Interpreting] (2004) and guest-editor of the special issue on Translation in Institutions for the journal Perspectives (2014). Her articles have appeared in a wide range of leading translation studies journals, including Target, The Translator, Meta, Perspectives and The Korean Association of Translation Studies (KATS) Journal. Previously the editor of The KATS Journal, she is currently on the editorial board of Perspectives.

Kyung Hye Kim is a lecturer in Translation Studies at the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a member of Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies. She holds a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies from the University of Manchester. Her academic interests lie in corpus-based translation studies, critical discourse analysis, and the application of narrative theory to translation and interpreting. At the time of writing, she is undertaking Rutherford Strategic International Fellowship at the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, UK.

Notes

1 Some translators have become so well-known that their names have been used for marketing and publicity purposes. For instance, the fact that Hwang Seok-Hui, who gained fame as a subtitler for the film Deadpool, Carol, and many others, is translating World of Warcraft became news (H. Jeong, 2016).

2 Film distributors tend to be conservative when it comes to hiring ‘newcomers’ whose skills they feel have not been verified by viewers yet (10Asia, 2013). As such, personal connections are crucial in entering the market in the first place, in addition to a high level of competence and experience.

3 Baker uses framing to theorize translation activism, but the view of framing in terms of creating anticipation structures in translation has been adopted by other translation studies scholars who have analysed the translation of news reports (e.g., Kang, 2008, 2012; Valdeón, 2015), paratexts of published translations (e.g., Kim, 2017), and others.

4 One key theoretical source is Bakhtin (1981, 1984), who differentiates between ‘social voice’ and ‘individual voice’. While social voice refers to socially typifiable speech depending on such factors as class, gender, and profession, individual voice is related to speech distinctions of specific persons and situated figures. Scholars who have found Bakhtin's discussions limiting (e.g., for the unclear boundary between social voice and individual voice), despite its crucial contribution to the development of the concept, have differently elaborated on the concept. For example, Agha (2005) focuses on the process through which people are socialized in their use of register, and Blommaert explores voice in terms of ‘the capacity to make oneself understood’ (2005, p. 255) by others. Agha (2005) and Blommaert (2005) both regard voice as a process and product—the conditions and circumstances of communication as well as its result.

5 Twitter: @20thCFoxKR, and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FoxMovies.KR/

6 Park Ji-Hoon has worked closely with 20CFox over the years, but has been at the center of controversy for some of his translation work. He is well known for using popular buzzwords in the Korean culture that do not necessarily ‘fit the scene’ of the original. For example, he translated a line from Ant-Man that reads ‘We got a guy who jumps, we got a guy who swings, we got a guy who crawls up a wall’, the last part of which alludes to the upcoming series of Spider-Man, to ‘그런 능력 가진 사람들 쌔고 쌨어요’ [People with those capacities are a dime a dozen], which fails to imply the forthcoming Marvel movie. In an August 2012 interview with the South Korean magazine Movie Week (issue 543), he commented that 20CFox has expressed its preference for the use of buzzwords and humorous elements in translations.

7 Unless indicated otherwise, all English translations in this article are ours.

8 The Korean language has an extensive system of honorific markers that encode interlocutors’ social relationship, including formal/informal relationships and the difference in age and social status. The addition of honorifics to Susan's lines is not required when social factors such as age and rank is considered here.

9 For example, honorific markers are added to Susan's utterances in her respective exchanges with Bradley Fine (Jude Law) and Rick Ford, both of whom are Susan's partner/colleague, with no explicit difference in age or rank (as described by 20CFox in https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3079380/, last accessed March 31, 2019). The steady use of honorifics in Susan's lines creates a hierarchical order to the male and female characters’ relationships, resulting in Susan either being projected as younger than Fine and Ford, or being placed in a lower rank/social status than the two males, as can be seen in the following two examples (honorifics in italics; from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi6F_ED9Lg0, last accessed March 31, 2019):

Example

1

1. Susan: 맙소사! 왜 죽였어요? (ST: Why did you do that?)

   Fine: 고의가 아녔어 / 꽃가루가 장난 아니란 말야 (ST: I didn't do it on purpose. / There's like a ton of pollen in here!)

2. Susan: 무슨 짓이에요? (ST: Ford, what the hell are you doing?)

   Ford: 구해줄게 (ST: I’m saving you!)

This is in contrast to the translation of Susan's lines in some fansub versions where honorifics are not used. Susan's relationships with these men are portrayed as being on an equal footing. For instance, ‘고리독터’, a fansubber who is relatively well-known for fansubbing episodes of the British television program ‘Doctor Who’, shared his/her fansubbed version of Spy, where the same exchanges between Susan and male characters were presented without any honorifics added (http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=csr100&logNo=220813240612, last accessed April 2, 2019).

Example

2

1. Susan: 아, 세상에! / 왜..왜 그랬어? (ST: Why did you do that?)

   Fine: 일부러 그런 거 아냐 / 여기 꽃가루 너무 많아! (ST: I didn't do it on purpose. / There's like a ton of pollen in here!)

2. Susan: 대체 뭐하는 거야? (ST: Ford, what the hell are you doing?)

   Ford: 너 구해주려는 거야! (ST: I’m saving you!)

10 https://twitter.com/20thcfoxkr/status/596173639403180034 (last accessed April 26, 2018).

11 https://www.facebook.com/FoxMovies.KR/posts/755353987897096?comment_id=755741451191683. &offset=0&total_comments=10&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D (last accessed April 26, 2018).

12 http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/04/13/2015041300610.html (last accessed April 3, 2018).

13 http://news.kmib.co.kr/article/view.asp?arcid=0009345337&code=61181511&cp=du (last accessed April 3, 2018).

14 Osen reported that Park, the professional translator, was in charge of the general translation and editing (H. Lee, 2015).

15 https://bit.ly/2IknKN9 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

16 https://cafe.naver.com/movie02/571029 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

17 https://cafe.naver.com/movie02/571029 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

18 https://www.facebook.com/cheolgu9/posts/919198481475165 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

19 https://www.facebook.com/cheolgu9/posts/919198481475165 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

20 DJUNA has never revealed her/himself in public, and all interviews are undertaken via emails.

21 http://www.djuna.kr/xe/review/12419020 (last accessed May 28, 2018).

22 https://cafe.naver.com/movie02/571029 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

23 https://twitter.com/yutnaz (last accessed August 25, 2018).

24 https://twitter.com/_camerashy/status/618621621511696386 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

25 https://twitter.com/nayuta09/status/601391971475722240 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

26 https://bit.ly/2UCZHPX (last accessed August 25, 2018).

27 https://dvdprime.com/g2/bbs/board.php?bo_table=movie&wr_id=1074720 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

28 https://dvdprime.com/g2/bbs/board.php?bo_table=movie&wr_id=1074720 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

29 https://twitter.com/20thcfoxkr/status/596637200629903362 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

30 https://twitter.com/20thcfoxkr/status/596637200629903362 (last accessed April 7, 2019).

31 https://twitter.com/search?q=%40honaboma%20SNL&src=typd&lang=en (last accessed April 7, 2019).

32 A well-known Korean TV producer Lee Young-don refused to be on the show when he was invited, mainly due to the high level of sexual humor that characterizes the program. He declined the SNL’s invitation for the reason that the sexual humor would not be appropriate for him (S. Lee, 2015).

33 Yoo and two other comedians set up their own podcast in 2013, which dealt with various issues. Listeners would send messages and mails to the program, which dealt with a topic chosen by the three comedians every week. Although the podcast ended in 2015, the offensive and degrading remarks they made concerning women sporadically in the program attracted public attention after the program ended.

34 http://theqoo.net/square/82440420 (last accessed May 28, 2018).

35 Many audiences complained that the subtitle team did a disservice to the original film. Some even asked for revised subtitles, while others expressed a preference for watching the film with English subtitles. Interestingly, film-goers who could follow the original without relying on Korean subtitles praised the film and mentioned that they would like to watch it again, but with a ‘proper’ translation. Others, who are familiar with the filmography of the director and understand his message/voice, also commented that it is worth watching. These last two groups of people tended to separate the subtitles from the film itself.