Blue Kino’s 2009 release of Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960) illustrates how removing a screenplay’s intentionally ‘ordinary’ conversation patterns from the subtitles can rob audiences of the vitality and pleasure of the original dialogue.

Director Kim Ki-young knew his business as a screenwriter. The film’s opening and closing sequences are often interpreted as bookends of reality enclosing a long dream/fantasy tale. However, Kim’s original Korean dialogue is intentionally vague about ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’. The screenplay offers clues to Kim’s intent. The subtitles should do the same.

The husband and wife begin the film speaking proper grammar in the original Korean script. As the story progresses the husband’s decline and seduction is indicated by looser, stilted phrasing and expressions that echo those used by the uneducated maid. In juxtaposition, the wife’s dialogue grows painfully correct. All of this is conspicuously absent from the Blue Kino translation. Grammar is proper throughout, leaving audiences with a mistaken sense of erudition on the part of the children and the maid. Most telling, the husband’s warmth—at times purposefully hackneyed—is entirely lost. In one scene, the wife mutters, “Having a young woman around the house is like offering a piece of raw meat to a tiger.” The husband then turns to the audience and offers joking advice. Continuing the Blue Kino translation:

—How correctly you put it. Ladies and gentleman, as men get older, they spend more time thinking about young women. That’s how they get drawn into women, which could lead to their destruction. This is true for all men.

South Korean melodramas during the 1950s and 1960s were targeted at a predominately middle-aged, married female audience, as observed by film scholar Kim Soyoung: “The melodramatic genre was considered an outlet for women to release their han (pent-up grief) over their experiences relating to repressive neo-Confucian patriarchy.” The intense emotive quality of The Housemaid was designed specifically to appeal to these viewers, as was the director’s skillful use of juxtaposition. Prior to this period in Korean film, breaking the fourth wall was primarily a comedic device. There are exceptions, but Kim Ki-young’s viewers would have been familiar with this bit of humor as seen in popular films and in Korea’s own folk performance traditions. Kim uses this known comic technique as catharsis to the melodrama preceding it and as bitterly ironic foreshadowing.

The tragedy that played out in the husband’s mind informs his foolishly jocular speech to the audience. He seems doomed to fulfill his own fantasies. When he addresses the camera he steps out of the film and lets the viewers in on his little daydream. Men are men, he smirks. But we know better, don’t we? Compare this dialogue to the wife’s invective earlier in the scene, the maid’s wanton gasp of cigarette smoke and the subtle way the husband notices these facts. In this context the immediate segue into avuncular grinning dialogue takes on dark undertones. The husband’s fantasy was fueled by awareness of this dynamic in the house. Later events may be informed by it. Consider this new translation that includes the wife’s invidious dialogue and the boys’ club humor of the husband:

—WIFE: Having a pretty young thing in the house is no better than serving up raw meat to a beast.

—HUSBAND: Meat? Beast? That’s a fact.
[to the audience] Ladies and gentlemen, as men age they find themselves thinking about younger women.
That makes us easy prey and, well, everyone gets hurt.
[pointing] You’re no different…
[pointing another direction] Oh, shaking your head? Uh-HUH!

The Blue Kino translation is not inaccurate. It is merely tepid. It captures the gist of the original but ignores the affected ‘normal’ speech patterns of the dialogue and fails to match the action on the screen. The last subtitle line (“This is true for all men.”) is almost nonsensical while watching the character’s actions. He is grinning, winking, pointing at audience members. His eyes glitter, his voice is jocular, his demeanor conspiratorial. This combination makes the source Korean film perfectly clear. (“You’re no different… Oh, shaking your head? Uh-HUH.”) The character’s chatty tone should be included as accurately as possible within the time and space available.

The Blue Kino translation is also far too brief. Even at the industry standard of no more than 1 character per 2 frames, rows that fit within 80 percent of the width of the picture, no more than 2 lines per screen and no more than 40 characters per line, the subtitles leave gaping holes between the spoken dialogue and the written word. The scene has plenty of time for the alliterative (meat/beast) and metaphoric (beast/prey) expressions of the husband’s original speech.

The film’s subtitles should do far more than merely transfer words from Korean to English. Kim Ki-young filled his film with dark comedy, pathos, wit and genuine emotion taken to grotesque extremes. Some scenes are overt, others are shaded with a surprising depth and breadth of meaning, revealed through subtle cues in dialogue, acting and cinematography. All of this belongs in the subtitles.

Blue Kino. The Housemaid Reference Book. Translation Supervision: Professor Kim Eun Gi and June Oh with thanks to the Korea Literature Translation Institute. (2009): 38. New translation © 2010 D. Bannon.

Kim, Soyoung. ‘Questions of Woman’s Film: The Maid, Madame Freedom and Women.’ Published in McHugh, Kathleen, et al. South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National Cinema. Wayne State University Press (2005): 190.

Lee, Yong-il & Choe Young-chol. The History of Korean Cinema. Jimoondang (1988): 120, 134. Translated by Richard Lynn Greever.