Never More Than 80 Letters
In the six years since I began writing English subtitles for Japanese films, I have worked on over 80 films...I render the dialogue of confused, angry, willful, and mischievous characters into a series of individual subtitles, always less than 80 letters long...For me, the process of translating and condensing Japanese dialogue into English is visceral. I experience the character's emotions in Japanese, but express them in English, two languages that could not be more disparate...A child of liberal American missionary parents, I was raised in rural Japan and attended Japanese schools...My unusual childhood seems to have left me with two separate but parallel brains, which allow me to hear in one language and experience in the other. In subtitling Japanese films, I highlight universal human elements by focusing on the essence of the characters and their communication, then "re-writing" it in English...more...
