Lost’s Language Barrier
Of all the rules that ABC’s “Lost” has broken over the past few years, one of the biggest is the one that says characters who don’t speak English will be lost on an American audience, with or without translation.
From the beginning, “the network and the studio… embraced this idea,” “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof said this week.
“And one of the ideas that we had was, if they were speaking to each other and other castaways were around, you wouldn’t see subtitles. If they were speaking to each other and they were alone, then you would. So you had the sense of the other castaways who didn’t speak Korean of not knowing exactly what they were saying to each other,” he said.
“And the fourth episode of the show was Sun’s [Yunjin Kim’s] flashback story, and we looked at the script and we realized, ‘Oh, my God, 40 percent of this show is in Korean.’ ”
Though their first thought was that “we’re going to get nailed on this,” the truth, Lindelof said, was “we never got that note: ‘Less Korean. Do they have to speak so much Korean together?’ ”
Nevertheless, this season, “I think one of the things that we want to do for Daniel’s character Jin is - he’s been on the island now, you know, completely submerged in an English-speaking culture for three months. And Jin’s no dummy, so he’s going to start speaking a lot more English on the show,” Lindelof said.
To which Daniel Dae Kim, a Haverford College graduate who essentially had to relearn his native Korean to be on the show, added, “Thank you.”
Source: Philadelphia Daily News
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POSTED IN: Daniel Dae Kim, Generally Lost
1 opinion for Lost’s Language Barrier
Brianne
Jan 20, 2007 at 9:17 am
I don’t know about you, but for someone who had to “relearn” his native language, he does excellent! I’ve never had a problem with subtitles, except for when the network chooses to run the annoying banners to advertise for upcoming shows across the bottom of the screen, effectively covering over the subtitles… sigh
When will they get a clue?
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