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Life on Saturn

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Madame Yu is such a tragic character because she had the potential to be just as complex as MXTX's other characters but she spends 99% of her screen time abusing orphan children so she just becomes cartoonishly evil

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RESTART THE SERIES I Official Trailer "I want to ride you."

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Jin Zixuan:[as Wei Ying walks by] What an ass.

Lan Wangji:[sighing and staring at his ass] I know.

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Mar 1, 2025 | Boss Chaikamon

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Can you show some support for FirstKhaotung?

translation credits to @/nellyangyang on twitter

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episode 25

cql ∞

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so i really enjoy the body acting in the scenes where jin guangyao gets up after getting kicked down the stairs, particularly in the scene with nie mingjue.

he gets up slowly, with difficulty, and then starts climbing back up the stairs, and there’s this almost mechanical jerkiness to his motions that i think is really significant to his character. the in-universe explanation is just that he is physically hurt so he is limping, but if you watch the scene, it’s pretty obvious that this is exaggerated and used for effect.

there is something really creepy both in the way this action is shot, lit, and edited between cuts, and the unnatural physicality of his movements. there’s an almost terminator-ish slow intentionality to it, an “i am going to keep coming for you even if you chop off parts of me,” and a singular, unemotional focus that calls to mind uncanny monsters in horror films.

this is further highlighted by the way it’s framed so that his face is either not visible or wearing a terrible smile mask. it’s almost like he’s possessed or being puppeteered from above in these moments. and i think this plays into his motivations and this idea that he has no choice.

and it’s like, we get this visual sign post: this is where the switch is flipped. we are no longer looking at kind doormat a-yao. this is the monstrous side of him.

but what really gets me is that we get the same motion, the painful, difficult lift onto his knees, the jerky shift of his shoulder, the slow uncurling of his back with the head only straightening at the end, in episode 49 in the temple:

the movement is almost identical to the way he straightens up in the first gif (and after jgs kicks him down the stairs!), and it’s a sign that he’s been cornered, so his survival instincts are about to take over. the switch has been flipped! his next line is the one about “that’s just the kind of person i am” right before he takes jin ling hostage. and i think this scene wants you to call to mind the other instances where he hurts people he cares about and see the connection.

there’s just all this visual and thematic detail to get you to consider a character beyond the obvious, and isn’t that neat??

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via studio(_)on(_)saturn @ twitter & instagram & facebook | 01032025

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remember the wonderful world of the untamed behind the scenes photos

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via studio(_)on(_)saturn @ twitter & instagram & facebook | 01032025

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Every now and then I think about how subtitles (or dubs), and thus translation choices, shape our perception of the media we consume. It’s so interesting. I’d wager anyone who speaks two (or more) languages knows the feeling of “yeah, that’s what it literally translates to, but that’s not what it means” or has answered a question like “how do you say _____ in (language)?” with “you don’t, it’s just … not a thing, we don’t say that.”

I’ve had my fair share of “[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it’s text!” “[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it’s text!” and every time. Every time I’m just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.

Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn’t. To lots of people, it doesn’t. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It’s great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn’t available through my local library very much wasn’t available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show. When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.

Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn’t led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.

And that’s … idk if it’s fine, but it’s what happens! A lot of the time, concepts – expressed in language – don’t translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn’t very idiomatic because there’s a register mismatch or worse. And that’s even before cultural assumptions come in. It’s normal to have those. It’s also important to remember that things like “thanks I hate it” as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn’t easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.

Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don’t have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator’s discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it’s the listener’s responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it’s lacking).

Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of “Go?” - “Go.” does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as “is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?” - “yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are” in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It’s arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying “Are you going?” - “I am (going)” might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.

This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking “are you going” or “is she going”? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it’s important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like “are we all going?” - “yes” or “they going, too?” might work. Context!

As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it’s because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it’s because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn’t. However, because in most cases translators don’t have access to the original authors, or even the original authors’ agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn’t get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it’s more of a “fuck it, I’ve got to put something and hope it doesn’t get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down” (especially fun when you’re working on a series that’s in progress).

For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there’ll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what “effectively” even means …

ANYWAY. I think my point is … how interesting, how cool is it that engaging with media in multiple languages will always yield multiple, often equally valid but just sliiiiightly different versions of that piece of media? And that I’d love more conversations about how, the second we (as folks who don’t speak the material’s original language) start picking the subtitle or dub wording apart for meta, we’re basically working from a secondary source, and if we’re doing due diligence, to which extent do we need to check there’s nothing substantial being (literally) lost – or added! – in translation?

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@chanbig

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I love how you can clearly see:

a) The exact moment Jiang Cheng decides to make this excruciating for everyone

b) Wei Wuxian’s realization that Jiang Cheng has committed to the bit and is fully prepared to just stand there and demand that they lie to his face.

c) Xichen bluescreening as he tries to figure out the odds that Jiang Cheng knows Xichen knows and whether or not he can play this off like oh, no … This is a different guy in a mask who follows my brother around everywhere and dresses exactly like the yiling patriarch… it’s the latest thing this season… you should try it out it’s very fashionable and great for your skin

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The Eclipse (2022): Episode 1 | Episode 12 Khaotung Thanawat as Ayan Sukkhaphisit; First Kanaphan as Akk Pipitphattana

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