> [SEELANGS] sub-titles

[Ashot Vardanyan]

Dear Michele,

My notes are somewhat different from what you want but might be of interest as well.

I want to share my observation and impression on the language(s) and subtitles of two films – Russian “Prisoner of Mountain” (“Kavkazskii plennik”) and American / British “Borat: cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan”. In both films the non-Armenian viewer naively reckons s/he hears the same language from the characters as s/he reads the English subtitles.

The scene of the former is set in the Russian North Caucasus, supposedly in Chechnya, the country that definitely has its own language. The filmmakers, however, run a unique trick: the local men and women speak in the main three languages of the entire Caucasus: Georgian, Azerbaijani, which is very similar to Turkish, and Armenian. There might be other Caucasian languages that I don’t know; however, from the outset, it was unusual to hear Georgian between Abdul-Murat and his daughter, but later the idea of the producers became clear: they probably aimed at demonstrating the commonality of all Caucasians which is, in turn, very dissonant to truth. The entire Caucasus is a bundle of problems. 

Armenian, my language, is represented by its “hamshena” dialect that is used by Armenians populating the Black Sea region. It appears only in the episode of the children’s talk, when a boy asks Dina if it is already time for her to marry. It seems to me, this is also political. The filmmakers couldn’t help knowing that Armenia and Russia are allies in all domains, whereas Georgia and Azerbaijan informally supported Chechnya’s insurgency and had other conflicts in their relations with Russia.

In “Borat…”, Azamat Bagatov, the partner of the main character, speaks Armenian during all the span of the film. As a matter of fact, the person who stars for him is an American Armenian actor Ken Davitian. He uses the mixture of the Eastern and Western Armenian dialects. I don’t remember what language Borat speaks, to the best of my memory, it’s either / both Russian or / and Kazakh but it’s definitely not Armenian. However, viewers don’t know this and follow the subtitles being under the impression the characters sound the same language.

…The quality of this film is a different topic.

Best,
Ashot Vardanyan, 
University of Iowa.


04/06 17:25 "Michele A. Berdy" <maberdy at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> Seelangers, o ye who know and see all...
> 
> Have any of you seen a multi-language film with sub-titles that
> distinguish between the languages spoken? If so, how did the
> sub-titles make the language distinction clear? Font? Italics?
> Other?
> 
> Feel free to send comments off list (this is fairly obscure...)
> Thanks
> 
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