This is what I was saying all along that I don’t understand why they don’t separate your Real blood related Family from acquaintances. Like,I could not call anyone else Aunt bc that would feel so disrespectful to my Real blood related Aunt. In my culture only your real aunt can hold the name of Aunt, not your uncle’s girlfriend or your mother’s friend. While in Asian culture is a sign of respect in my culture it would be disrespectful to our blood related family. I honestly would not like to be called aunt, unless it comes from my own nephews and nieces.
I’m not saying this is wrong, I was just saying that in my culture is so different and it shocks me, and that is why I mentioned that here bc is a total shocker for me to see non blood related family been called sister or aunt.
I already know how that works in Asian culture since I have been subbing Korean, Chinese, etc dramas since 2013. The only time I won’t write Aunt (tia) is in a drama from Spain bc they call aunt (tia) to young teenage girls and that really won’t sound right when translated into English.
Not only in Italy but in Greece too, we call mother’s friends “Aunt”. Usually with the name afterwards, i.e. “Aunt Electra” or “Aunt Sofia”. The idea being that my mother and this person are close as sisters, so if she’s my mother’s “sister”, she’s automatically my “aunt”.
In India, my friends’ children all called me “Auntie”
So it’s surely not only a Far Eastern thing.
Throughout Hawaii, older females are called “Auntie” – even by adults. It’s a sign of respect. In Korea, sometimes I was addressed as “Mother” by strangers.
@angelflight
Because I am in fact older than most of the people I see, I do not take offense when I was address as"Mother" in Korean by complete strangers or addressed as “Auntie” in Hawaii. I take it as a sign of respect within the respective culture.
Well, if someone addresses you as Auntie, they will always be younger than you. My friends’ children called me that in India. I was around 30 at the time - approximately their mother’s age, so it was totally appropriate, although it took me aback somehow the first time I heard it.
That’s what so great about Vicki compared to Netflix which americanizes everything…including the word order of Korean names. When we come to watch a korean drama why does it have to reflect our culture. Very disrespectful and myopic. I have learned so much about their language and customs and enjoy learning unfamiliar terms like noona & hyung which have more than one meaning depending on the parameters of a relationship. And so we encounter “I will eat well,” and also one I like a lot, and now use with my family: “I will leave first” for when we are ending a family event. We all race to see who will use that phrase first. I wrote to a moderator recently to ask why she had re-arranged the word order for Korean names in a drama and if perhaps it was her decision, or one that Viki had made. I haven’t received a reply yet. If I don’t, I’ll pass this ‘upstairs’ to get an answer. I don’t want to lose the ‘korean’ in korean dramas.
Viki doesn’t interfere with subbing and editing choices, so it’s the moderator’s choice.
Recently, we have an influx of already subbed films and dramas. It takes a lot of editing to “vikify” them, first of all for formatting and then adding all the hyeongs and nunas, including all the food names, and exclamations (such as aigoo, omo, fighting or Aish).
However, although I bring back many of these Korean terms, I don’t agree with using those sentences that don’t make sense in English and do not exist in proper English.
“No, I really don’t like that expression because it makes no sense to me at all. Of course, the concept is normal and acceptable in Asian countries (I see the Japanese saying the same thing) but in the workplace, everyone’s for themselves, and you must take care of yourself (always watch your back), not your new co-workers.”
Ouch. Harsh. I study korean here with foreign students coming into class to help us with conversation. Whenever someone new comes in, they say the very same thing in their introductions and explain that this is to start off a work relationship on a positive note. Whether ‘we’ like it or not…or if it doesn’t make sense to us…this is their drama and unique way of expressing their culture. It worries me if we think it ok to culturally appropriate a drama to make it more sensible or maybe sound sweeter to our ears and own viewpoints because it hints at coming from a place of superiority. I don’t think subtitlers are interested in re-writing a script, just in sharing it with others. Ok…I’ll get off my soapbox at this point.
Not sweeter, but it has to make sense. To mean something to the reader.
If an expression makes no sense to an English viewer and does not exist in the language, it’s not cultural appropriation but proper translation to put a sentence which is grammatically, syntactically and meaning-wise correct in English. Instead of “You’ve worked hard”, “I’m leaving first”, “You’ve come”, we can put “Good evening”, “Have a nice day”, “See you tomorrow”, “Hello”, “Welcome”, “Oh, you’re here”.
I’ve worked as a professional translator for more than 40 years and I can assure you that nobody thinks it is cultural appropriation. (Of course the whole concept of cultural appropriation is a very recent fad which can go to very silly extremes)
Of course, what to include and what is not always obvious. And it depends on the general policies of the publisher (here it’s the moderator).
Yes, if they are talking about a sari, you’ll say a sari, not a gown, and possibly explain what a sari is on a footnote. Because a gown is something completely different and belongs to a completely different culture. But how many local words you allow to be interspersed in the text is not a given, you have to think about it: too many and it might be tiring (also tiring to jump to footnotes all the time), too few and it will become bland and lose its flavour.
Here on Viki, we leave untranslated some Korean terms for local flavour, but it is essential to explain them. Even if 90% of the viewers will already know most of them, there will always be newcomers who have to be “educated”. I’m watching My Princess right now, and the second female lead at some point called the male lead “oppa”, so in the comments people were first asking what it means and when somebody told them, they were shockedly and confusedly wondering “So is he her brother?” Other viewers had to explain. So I think it’s the subbing team’s responsibility to do it, properly, once. I usually put a footnote the first time such a term appears and then I assume they remember.
Thanks Irmar. So interesting that your career has been as a translator! And I do agree there are extremes in phrasing that need to be morphed into ‘proper’ english in order to help the viewer. My time watching dramas on Viki since 2015 has been such a learning experience exactly because of those moments when I noticed the differences in Korean language as well as their culture. When I saw phrases like “I’ll be leaving first” or “You worked hard”…it twigged my interest as to their cultural perspective versus my own. How saying “I’ll be leaving first” instead of “Good-bye” might be seen in terms of someone signalling politely to the group that they are leaving and reflect a culture where ‘we’ is more emphasized than the ‘me’. Same with “you’ve worked hard”…words that show some thought about the person you’ve had service from, or have been working with. Replacing it with good-evening can cover it of course because it’s friendly and we say that when we leave a store or our workplace, but for me, ‘you’ve worked hard’ comments specifically on the other person’s service for you and exemplifies the polite respect I’ve experienced so often in Korea where ‘working hard’ is a compliment. I know–these are such small differences and I have no quibble generally with most terms, especially when trying to cram words into a small translation bubble. I do hope though that we can keep the flavour of the language by educating the audience too, like you do for “Noona” &“Hyung”. When I began watching these dramas, words like ‘Aiish’ & ‘Aigoo’ didn’t faze me because we heard the word at the same time we saw the emotions on the screen. In fact it spurred my interest in studying the korean language. Three years ago, my grandkids who were 13 and 15, and have been watching many dramas with me, heard something in the kitchen and both of them yelled out to me: “Gwenchana?!?” The seventeen year old mastered the Korean alphabet on his own to surprise me and a Korean friend. My sister-in-law watched her first drama last month: ‘Moon Embracing Sun’ and texted: “Well I already know what Aigoo and Oreaboni” mean, and that’s without translation!" It’s been so nice to self-discover Korean on my own and I hope we won’t smother the interest others might find in learning the ‘quirk’s’ of korean language. My biggest disappointment lately has been to see a few dramas where the names were ‘re-arranged’ to fit our western preferences. Koreans say their last names first. It is the Korean way, and so many other viewers over the years have been able to adjust and learn from this without losing an understanding of the drama, so why not leave it rather than having it spoon-fed in a more palatable way? Ok, I stepped down from my soapbox again. Done. Just needed to make a plea for protecting the essence of these special dramas, not to criticize but to promote the sub-text of korean culture in our subtitles. Thanks for the discussion…and thanks Irmar for your hard work all these years! Subtitlers are THE real heroes on Viki.
Guys, I’m completely new to this discussion board, and my question has absolutely nothing to do with this thread. Please forgive me for this. The reason I’m posting is because I can’t for the life of me find the button to create a new topic/thread. I combed over the page countless times and still can’t find it. Where is it!?!?!?
I created a new topic for this matter to not make this topic look too messy, since we can’t handle it only with one question one answer…
I will delete my other comments I made to clean up this topic - go here for further information https://discussions.viki.com/t/can-not-create-new-topic-button-missing/22782
@mavsynchroid_588
Before social media – with Twitter and Facebook and so on – ruled the world, people would hang out in these online forums. Viki Discussions is based on those forums. Unfortunately, they have certain legacy rules that Viki never removed. For one, you can’t create your own topic until you’ve commented on other topics. I don’t know the number of comments, though. Just go through every topic and post something.
I totally agree on Korean person names order.
Koreans themselves, when they move to the US or other Western countries, adapt their names to put the family name last instead of first, because they are afraid that people will assume it is their given name and viceversa. Even in books you see this. It’s sad, but library and publishing house catalogues would be a mess if certain names followed a different order.
But in dramas and films it’s different, we don’t have such restrictions, so there’s no need to do it.
It’s so sweet that your family members are all in the same boat and you can all share this. I haven’t been able to convince a single family member or friend to watch even one episode of a Korean drama or film, no matter how hard I tried. I feel a total failure, LOL!
When I first started watching Kdramas (in the summer of 2018), I was kinda confused as to how the names worked. I did research on that, and was quite pleased with myself when I could finally pick out the last names and the first names. Now, I get confused when I’m watching a Kdrama on, say, Netflix, and the name order is first, last instead of last, first. Same goes with Chinese dramas and names. Honestly, I get kinda peeved when the name order isn’t reflective of the original culture, but I understand why Netflix would do that.
And as for timed comments…I’ll make a comment here and there, but turn off the comments when I’m watching the show because they can be distracting, and they can be inappropriate, although some are funny and have made me laugh until my face hurt
