About this Conference and Conversation Series
Watch a recording of the video here:
Join us for Week 10 of Translating the Future as we continue our series of conversations between translators with “Subtitling Subtleties,” featuring Darcy Paquet, Linda Hoaglund, and Xiaolu Guo.
The global success of Bong Joon Ho's Oscar-winning Parasite confirmed a dramatic shift in what stories movie audiences across the world, and those in the United States, are willing to embrace as "universal." Subtitlers, particularly those who make subtitles in the lingua franca that is English, play a crucial role in rendering films intelligible for such global reception. Parasite's subtitler Darcy Paquet assesses this intricate art with Linda Hoaglund, a bilingual film director and producer and the subtitler of 250 Japanese films, including Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and award winning writer-director Xiaolu Guo (She, a Chinese, UFO in Her Eyes) responds from a filmmaker's perspective.
The conversations will be hosted by Esther Allen & Allison Markin Powell. *Viewers can submit questions during the livestreaming at [email protected].
Speaker Bios:
Darcy Paquet teaches in the International Film Business Academy at the Busan Asian Film School. He is the founder of the website Koreanfilm.org and the author of New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves (2010). A former correspondent for Screen International and Variety, in 2013 he launched the Wildflower Film Awards Korea, which celebrates achievement in Korean independent filmmaking. He also works as a program consultant for the Udine Far East Film Festival. Over the years he has done the English subtitle translation for over 100 Korean films, including Parasite (2019), The Handmaiden (2016), and On the Beach at Night Alone (2017). Darcy has been living in Seoul since 1997. View his online tutorial for film subtitling here.
Linda Hoaglund is a bilingual filmmaker whose childhood in Japan inspired the five feature-length films she has completed to date. Born in Japan, the daughter of American missionary parents, she attended Japanese public schools and graduated Yale University. She has subtitled 250 Japanese films, including Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa, Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki, and Battle Royale by Fukasaku Kinji. She has also translated Kabuki performances by Heisei Nakamura-za at Lincoln Center and essays by Issei Miyake, Ishiuchi Miyako, Tomatsu Shomei, Yokoo Tadanori, Kirino Natsuo, Moriyama Daido, Ando Tadao and other renowned artists and writers. She is currently editing and translating a book featuring designer Taku Satoh's work. She resides in Brooklyn, NY. View the trailer for her most recent film at Edo Avant Garde.
After earning an MA at the Beijing Film Academy, Xiaolu Guo moved to London in 2002, and in 2013 was named one of Granta’s Best of the Young British Novelists. Her films include She, a Chinese (2009), which won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival, and UFO in Her Eyes (2011), an adaptation of her novel of the same title. In 2019, the Whitechapel Gallery in London held a complete retrospective of her cinematic work. Her third novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2008)— first of her books to be written in English—has been translated into 26 languages. Her memoir Nine Continents received the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Her most recent novel, A Lover’s Discourse, is forthcoming in 2020.
Translating the Future:
Visit Translating the Future page here for the complete conference Program, video recordings of previous events in this series, as well as archival audio recordings, articles, the original program, and more history from PEN's 1970 World of Translation conference.
This conference and conversation series is co-sponsored by PEN America, the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, with additional support from the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
