sub-titles

[Andy Hicks]

I wrote the subtitles for the 1995 movie Kolja, which is based in part on
the conflict between -- and some eventual mixing of -- Czech and Russian. 
Unfortunately, at the moment I can't find my U.S. dvd of the movie, so I
can't confirm whether we ended up using italics for the Russian or not.  

I synchronized that set of titles along with with people from Miramax and
LVT/Laser Video Titles, so my experience probably represents the mainstream
approach, at least as of 13 years ago.  At the time, I was suggesting
various ways to preserve the linguistic shading.  Printing the subtitles in
different colors was rejected immediately.  Putting the Russian in brackets
was considered but rejected (likely due to character count).  If you can
find a dvd before I do, you'll know whether I managed to argue successfully
for italics.

There are two important instances of language mixing in the film that we
were unable to mark typographically.  In the first, the Czech protagonist
has to make a subway announcement in poorly remembered/reconstructed
Russian.  It's one of the bigger laughs in the movie for Czechs, and to get
the humor across in the titles I resorted to all types of deformed English
including misspellings.  In the second, the Russian child character
gradually starts mixing Czech into his Russian, ending up with a sort of
common Slavic hybrid; that element just dropped by the wayside for English
speakers.

In general, I had a lot more bad English grammar in the draft than in the
final set of titles.  The movie folks in the room felt that those
intentional mistakes would break the spell for the audience.  Generally we
left in one blatant error to establish that a character was butchering the
language, and then left the rest to  the imagination.

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