For my GEM Capstone class, I was part of a discussion group that talked about various forms of how film, literature, and other forms of media influence people’s day-to-day communication both intra and interculturally (Please see the powerpoint we created for the class attached below). We analyzed “Reel to Real: Desi Teens Linguistic Engagements with Bollywood” by Shalini Shankar and “Speaking Without a Body: Japanese Women’s Language in Translation” by Miyako Inoue, two readings that covered media in circulation in places such as Japan, India, and the US. I thought the insights we encountered were especially important as someone who’s particularly interested in international filmmaking, as well as concerned with the hegemonity of American media worldwide and how that could impact anyone’s views on global matters or interactions.
My part of the presentation focused specifically on two examples given in Inoue’s reading that spoke about the transfiguration of language as it circulates around different parts of the world and their respective audiences. The first was a Japanese novel, Solitude Point by Haruyoshi Yoshimeki, written entirely in Japanese, taking place in the US but still incorporating Japanese-speaking characters. It resorted to employing ways of denoting when characters were speaking in English and what their individual accents were like through Japanese. The second example focused on Victor Flemming’s film Gone With The Wind and its translation into Japanese. It referred to the translation as a transposing of language, with codes in Japanese being assigned to have equivalent meanings to codes in the English language. For example, the class and racial difference between Vivian Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara and Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy was distinguished by giving Scarlett O’Hara a more feminine form of speech against Mammy’s masculine-sounding speech.
The analysis was quite rewarding and insightful for my work as a filmmaker who loves to use intercultural blends and flexibility in his work (such is the case in my thesis film that uses English, Spanish, and Arabic). Knowing not just that something is lost in translation but knowing a language well enough to know what is lost in translation holds newfound importance to me both in expression and comprehension.
