Na Hong-jin's "The Wailing"



This is the last of a four-part series on the importance of translation in globalizing Korean culture. ― ED.

By Park Jin-hai





Park Chan-wook's "The Handmaiden" Darcy Paquet

Darcy Paquet, an American film critic and translator who has worked on English subtitles for over 100 Korean films, says movie subtitles in English have come a long way.

"The situation now is better than, for example, the late 1990s. Some of the films I see are translated quite well. But other times you come across some that don't, which is very frustrating, because the Korean dialogue is interesting but the subtitles are not," said Paquet during a recent interview with The Korea Times.

The Massachusetts native, who has been living in Korea for nearly 20 years, has been introducing Korean films to international movie fans and working on translations of numerous award-winning Korean films.

Most recently he worked on director Park Chan-wook's "The Handmaiden" and director Na Hong-jin's "The Wailing," both of which were invited to this year's Cannes Film Festival last month.

Paquet says it's not mistakes and grammatical errors that ruin subtitles.

Taking the example of actress Kim Hye-soo's famous line in the movie "Tazza: The High Rollers," whose word-for-word English translation reads like "I'm an Ewha Womans University graduate," he says sometimes he think subtitles are too simple.

"The original dialogue is very specific, but the English subtitles were very abstract. I think abstract is usually boring. You need to try hard to put specifics into the dialogue to make it interesting," he said. "Even if many foreigners watching don't know the school, people understand this must be a prestigious university and you get more of the feeling of the original. It sounds strange if you make it very abstract and easy to understand."

He says translating subtitles is somewhere closer to translating poetry than novels.

"You have such a small space. In translating poetry you try to make it rhyme. You have such restrictions on how you can do it, and if you want to express everything, you have to be really creative on how you do it," said Paquet.

He says most people would feel frustrated translating subtitles, even more so than translating novels, because the translator has to make compromises. "If there are two ideas in the sentence, many translators just cut one idea and translate the other idea. I think what translators need to do is to become better at squeezing more information into a small amount of space," he said.

He mentioned "Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits," a documentary about shamanism directed by Park Chan-kyong, Park Chan-wook's younger brother, which he said is the most daunting job he has done. He adds that his recent translations for "The Handmaiden" and "The Wailing" have been just as painstaking.

With Park's film "The Handmaiden," actor Ha Jung-woo speaks very quickly, he said. "There was a lot of information and the dialogue was really interesting, so we wanted to include as much as possible. We really had to struggle to just to fit everything into the space."

As for Na's film, the dialect has given him a hard time.

"I love the way actress Chun Woo-hee speaks in that final scene. Her language was very simple but very weird. It's not standard speech. It's part dialect," he says.

"Sometimes you can do halfway. Dialect is part vocabulary, part intonation and part delivery. But, you can't write down intonation. You only use words."

The solution he came up with was to use older words people don't use so much in speech these days.

"As for dialect, you can hint at it and you can give it kind of a feeling of it, but you can't make the feeling of dialect as strong as in Korean. If you try to do that, then it comes out sounding really awkward and distracting," he explained.

Paquet says it helps to talk with directors.

"When often there are two ideas to translate it, I don't know which one is better," he said. "If the director says which one is better, it is closer to the director's intention. So I like working with directors."

With "The Handmaiden," his first work with Park, he says he went through many drafts for the subtitle translations.

"Park Chan-wook is a perfectionist in terms of film," he said, adding that they started working on it before the film was finished in anticipation of its invitation to Cannes.

"A lot of dialogue was changed at the last minute, so we had to update subtitles a lot. I sat down together with the director and looked at every dialogue line by line. We would try to come up with good solutions together."





Favorite languages of directors

Paquet added that the kind of language director Park likes is different from the language of Hong Sang-soo, another respected director he has worked with.

"You can feel the difference in Korean as well. Park's dialogue is very unusual and I think he does it on purpose. Sometimes he writes sentences in the way that people don't speak," he said. "It sounds unnatural but at the same time surprising and interesting. It's expressive. So the English ends up being similar words. It doesn't sound very natural but it sounds expressive. You have to choose between a more simple and natural feeling line of dialogue and something that is closer to the original but that feels a little bit awkward."

Although Park's movie is an adaptation from the British novel "Fingersmith" by Sarah Waters, he says he didn't use the same dialogue.

Most of the time it was better not to do exactly the same, he says because the film was different from the book.

The word "pigeon," used in the original book to symbolize the character's innocence, was changed into "lamb" in Park's movie.

"They appear on the screen in a flash and I don't think that you should make the viewers sit and think about the meaning of the word," he said.

Paquet has been running koreanfilm.org, an English-language website for Korean films, since 1999, posting reviews as well as a number of other international publications. He also teaches a cinema class at Korea University's International Summer Campus (ISC) program.

He says people around the world are still impressed by Korean movies.

"If you think about Korean cinema's place, it is very small compared to dramas and K-pop. It doesn't have that kind of popularity. The last five years have not been especially strong for Korean cinema compared to ten years and fifteen years ago. But, I think there are well-made films," he said. "From international perspectives, Korean movies don't travel very very far but only a few exceptions ― I think The Handmaiden and The Wailing both ― would probably be seen by a lot of people internationally."

Although he says Korea is full of talented movie makers, it is hard to make films in Korea ― the kind of films that could grab attention at international film festivals. Korea is high on technical skills but the business structure is a problem, he says.

"There are some issues with the system. I think it is easier to make films ― the kind of films that are successful at Cannes ― in Europe, because there is support for kind of big-budget art house films. Whereas in Korea, art house films are very low budget and it's only director Park Chan-wook and Bong Jun-ho," he said.

"Few directors have the power to make very cutting-edge films and look beautiful and cinematically very well made. If the government provided more financial support for filmmakers, like Europe does, then they could make films that would be more successful. That is the biggest thing."