My life at a Korean law firm (part 37)
By Jacco Zwetsloot
When we lived in Melbourne for four years, Jimin taught Korean as a second language to people from heritage and non-heritage backgrounds. One of her students, a Chinese-Australian women married to a Korean man, visited Korea in 2004 and introduced us to a friend of her husband. This man worked for a company that produced English-language subtitles for Korean television programs, to export them around the world. And so began one of the more unusual projects that my wife and I have ever done: co-translating the scripts of Korean dramas, music shows, documentaries and even a movie.
Because we both worked part-time at other jobs (including my half-time work at City Hall), we had time to do this on the side. It did make for a lot of late nights, though, and sometimes frayed nerves when deadlines loomed and the scripts seemed to go on forever. Our career highlight was when one of the shows that we subtitled won an award at a documentary festival somewhere. It was a documentary about Korean food.
I was surprised at how labor intensive the work was. The broadcasters didn't usually provide scripts, so most of the time a minimum wage worker watched the show and transcribed every word. That file would then be sent to us. Jimin would watch the show together (either via a video-on-demand service or on a DVD) with the file open on her computer, typing the English equivalent immediately below. She then sent the semi-completed file to me, and I would go through the interlinear translation, checking for sense and accuracy and generally fixing up the colloquial English. In areas where I wasn't sure of the meaning of something, I'd place an asterisk, and later we would go through them all together.
My Korean reading and writing improved and so did my wife's written English, but I can't say that my listening got much better, because I rarely watched the shows themselves. This was mostly because I didn't enjoy their entertainment or aesthetic value.
Once we were finished translating a show, we would send it back to the company, where a person with apparently no knowledge of English would simply copy and paste our translations into the subtitle-generating software. We suspected they were not English capable because sometimes mistakes were made that involved the wrong subtitle going in at the wrong time. We had to be careful to add helpful notes, and it was also necessary to not go over two lines of 40 characters, no matter how long the character spoke, because of the restrictions of subtitles as a medium of communication. The learning curve was steep and this led to very much reduced translations and creative paraphrasing.
The last step in the process was that a native speaker would watch each show to make sure that the finished product made sense. Two Americans worked full time going through all the output that was being produced. Apart from us, there were other freelance translators, so all in all a lot of manpower was going into this work.
Once or twice a year the company would get us all together and take us out for dinner. Shortly before one of these, we translators had all been sent a guide on how to do our work better ― a kind of style guide. Unfortunately, the document was riddled with errors, so I resolved to go through and mark them all with a red pen. I didn't have time before the day of the dinner, so I ended up doing it at the table just after arriving at the restaurant. I had no idea that the Korean employee who sat immediately opposite me and looked on in silence as I scribbled red pen all over the document was the very person who had put that document together. It seems she had lived in Saipan during middle and/or high school, and her English was considered the best among the in-house staff, so she was tasked with preparing the guide. As far as I recall, she never spoke to me after that.
One day we were contacted by a movie production company and asked if we could translate the script for an entire movie. The deadline was so tight that we would have to send the file back within 48 hours of receiving the DVD. It was a comedy about some gangsters or hoodlums being stuck on an island inhabited only by old women and the large crop of marijuana they grew there. It was a mildly amusing film, but what really stuck with me was it was the first time I had seen cannabis explicitly referred to in a Korean cultural product. However, there was no time to dwell on that because of the time restrictions. Jimin and I hardly slept for two nights, and barely got it finished in time. For this reason we never did another movie script.
Sometimes, to amuse myself, I put in words or phrases that came from somewhere deep in my cultural lexicon ― callbacks that only I would understand. Once, a character in a drama had fallen and said something about that, so I changed Jimin's translation to “I've fallen … and I can't get up.” Americans of a certain age or people like me who used to watch television programs of advertisements from around the world would remember it as the plaintive cry of an elderly person in some kind of personal safety alarm commercial from the 1980s or '90s. It wasn't until almost a year later that I ran into Luke, one of the native-speaker subtitle checkers, who told me that he had seen it and it had tickled his funny bone.
Eventually Jimin and I had to stop doing the translations. The rate per script was lowered by the production company, and we were busy enough with our full-time work that we informed them we would not be continuing. I can't say I miss the work, but it served a need at the time.