I grabbed a japanese TV show that someone recommended called “14-sai no haha” (”14 year old mother” — I know, scary name) the other day, despite the fact I couldn’t find it with english sub-titles. I tend to watch stuff “raw” (without subtitles) from time to time, but it always tends to be stuff that I do have subtitles for, or that I can obtain subtitles for. Most often, if not in every case, I have watched stuff after seeing it with subtitles, or I watch episode 10 of a show and I’ve seen episodes 1-9 already, with subtitles… in short, I always come with “baggage”, and it always makes it a lot harder than it really is.

If you’ve ever tried to learn another language and you’ve watched some show or movie or whatever, in that language, without subtitles, you inevitably think: “I am missing a lot of the subtle aspects of this show.”

If you really like it, you will refuse to miss those subtle aspects and do everything in your power to be able to get those as well. That in my case would mean some digging around for the show in question, with subtitles. In this case, it’s not out there. At least not as far as I know.

So I watched the first couple of episodes without subtitles, and aside from a few rapid-speaking-or-overly-complex moments, I didn’t miss anything of what was going on. In fact, I can without feeling guilty say that I understood everything. That may not sound too spectacular to you….

It made me realize something very important. When you read subtitles, and you listen to what they say, and you try to match the subtitles with what is being said, you will inevitably end up confusing the living shit out of yourself. Because what is happening is, your brain is trying to convince itself that “A” is synonymous with “B”, but as is the case with subtitling, especially with a language like Japanese, which differs tremendously from English, is that…

• The translators will not translate word-by-word. That if-do english into become-not. It would be a nice collection of words, and only the people who had been studying Japanese for awhile would even know what on earth was going on. The rest would go “these damn people don’t know english, and still they translate stuff…!”
• The translators will try to bridge the cultural gaps which are very much present in languages. For example, one translation I saw turned (Japanese) “Kalle-san…!” into (English) “Are you all right?” — now, that’s okay, cause even the freshest of language students will realize that “Kalle-san” doesn’t mean “Are you all right?”, but it serves as a good example for “conversions” that translators do. Conversions that you become so used to that you forget about them.

In my case, I get a lot of what I hear, as long as it’s easy and not complex and not too rapidly spoken and not too heavily dialected… and at this point, I sort of watch something, with subtitles, and listen to what is being said, and mostly, I can sort of agree with the subtitles. I compromise. My brain does. It gets some sentence, reads the subtitles, and after I think for a bit, I nod and say “Ah, yes. That’s true.” I kept thinking this was me simply not being, you know, fluent. I have to think for awhile before I can conclude that the translation matches. But it’s not so. I realized this when I sat back and let English and Swedish be something separate from Japanese. Listening, the meaning of what was spoken was clear to me. The translation into Swedish or English was not.

I’ve spoken a lot about this now, and I thought I’d repeat myself a bit. Back in the days (i.e. a year and some months ago) I wrote on this blog, saying I was going to “document” my developments in learning a language. I think I’ve done a pretty good job at it, so far, with the risk of boring the living shit out of those of you who don’t care about it. I’ve a lot left to go.