I found a draft I wrote around 1990. Days gone by.
Several years ago, I had a freelance job translating Chinese movie subtitles into English.
I did the English subtitles for those forgettable Chinese films you regretted paying the price of admission for, from Flute in the Mist/霧裡的笛聲, so artistic that it could barely move, and just laid on the floor and moaned and then disappeared from the theaters forever after its third day, to Liao T’ienting, the Chinese Robin Hood / 中國羅賓漢，廖添丁, which began with the patriotic decision to assassinate the Japanese crown prince, and ended abruptly halfway through a
tangle of infighting amongst Taiwanese gangsters.
My pay was 5NT a line (about 12 cents US at the time). If there were too many words, the audience would see only the actors’ eyebrows, so each sentence or phrase had to be squeezed into 58 spaces for letters, punctuation, and spaces. Even now I sometimes catch myself counting letters when I write.
58 spaces required some ingenuity, but then, no Chinese movie would be complete without the entire cast’s repeating “Hurry up!” or “Come eat!” And Chinese are so polite! NT$5 for each and every “Thank you.” Yes indeed!
An average movie was about 600 lines, which I could knock off in about five hours. I should mention that I got the job because I’m about the fastest translator in the business. I started on a portable typewriter and earned enough to buy an electronic typewriter and even learned how to touch type. Once you’ve done a couple dozen of these, your typing improves.
I read an article about some American teenager movie (Zarb?) being translated into French; it seems the translators (notice the plural!) watched the movie 25 times before they did their translating. They must have been getting paid a lot more than I was! French and English, English and French, how hard can that be? Maybe they chose an auspicious day and sacrificed a goat when they finally began translating, I don’t know, but one of my conditions was that they could never ask me to watch the movies – translating them was bad enough.
My speed also meant that I got all the rush jobs. My man would appear just before midnight with a big wad of paper, Can you give me this tomorrow morning?
And the scripts I’ve done! This was before Chinese computers got popular, and almost nobody knew how to type Chinese, so the scripts were all scrawled out longhand, blue ink on white paper with green blocks for the characters, with Arabic numerals in red giving the line number. But as often as not, what they would give me was photocopies of the script, so the red numbers became black, too. Or photocopies of photocopies, which my man pulled out of his hip pocket after he rode over on his motorcycle, unless he had held the script over his head in the rain. I still shudder to think of it.
We didn’t even have faxes in those days. If they found some lines that had been missing, or got edited back into the final cut, the typist would phone me up, read me the lines, and I would laboriously spell it out for her: C, the third letter; O, the round one; M, two humps; E, a vertical with three horizontal lines ~~ no, no, not 王, the English letter E, okay, follow the E with a space, then the next word begins with another E, the same letter, yes, that’s ok, then followed by A, the first letter, and then a T, as in Taiwan, you know the one that looks like 丁 as in 甲乙丙丁; then a comma, the kind with a tail, another space and the third word, begins with an F, you know like an E but only two lines up on top; then an R, it’s round on top and has two legs, the letter before S, no, no, there’s no S in this word, I mean in … never mind, you know the R? ok, let’s keep going, you’ve got an F and an R, right? then an I, that’s a vertical line with a dot on top, then another E, we’ve got a lot of those, then an N, that’s just one hump, and then a D, the fourth letter, then you put down a period. I kid you not. How well do you think you could write Chinese if I were trying to talk you through it over the phone?
Once Chang came and picked up my translation, they turned it over to a typist to retype for the camera. I’m not a very good proofreader myself, so my translations must have had typos, but at least I know English. You may have gathered from my narrative of spelling the words, a knowledge of English was not part of the typist’s job description.
But the job at times brought a sense of achievement. My proudest accomplishment was in a comedy when the slapstick heroine called the hero 科學怪豬/Scientific Weird Pig; it was funny, in context. Now we all know that Frankenstein in Chinese is 科學怪人/Scientific Weird Man. But how to translate this? drum roll please:: Frankenswine.
You may applaud.
Oh, and I also translated A Kind Mother’s Tears/ 慈母淚, and then there was The Thousand Year Old Ginseng King / 千年參王, the thrilling story about how Thousand Mile Eyes / 千里眼 and Windward Ears / 順風耳 rescue the Thousand Year Old Ginseng King, who was being chased over hill and dale by goblins who wanted to feed him to their ailing chief. But of course you already saw those, didn’t you.
Didn’t you?
