Saturday, April 14, 2007

Almost Lost in Translation

One day in Shanghai was completely rainy and miserable, so I decided to try and go to the movies. My options were limited to some Chinese movies that I never heard of, a British movie that I never heard of, and Babel. So after thinking about it for a few minutes, and figuring out that Babel was being shown in its original version, I decided to give it a try. I asked for one ticket...

Ticket Woman: Just so you know, the subtitles are only in Chinese.
Me: Um, ok...isn't this movie in English?
(Which is when I remembered that a lot Babel is in Spanish and Japanese!)
Ticket Woman: Parts of it are not, and there will not be English subtitles.

At this point I thanked her profusely for saving me from sitting in a movie theater in Shanghai for over 2 hours watching people speak Japanese in an American movie with me just hoping that they were saying "North south east west big person gate heaven sea capital central country" so that I could have a chance of understanding anything.

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