%20 Honors 'backstroke of the west' with an interview with Jeremy Winterson, finder and blogger of the engrish RotS subtitles.
Shortly after the release of Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith, the inevitable happened, a chinese bootleg. Although The People's Republic of China had decreed March 15, Anti-Piracy Day, the chinese speaking public's desire to view culture from outside their country had lead to a mini-industry of people re-subtitling movies. Normally, the re-subtitling is done into Mandarin for the benefit of the non-english reading world, but in this case the subtitler took it a step further and provided a new set of English subtitles for the world to read. But they weren't just read, they were embraced and became an active part of the cultural evolution as an internet meme. And we have Jeremy Winterson to thank for this opportunity.
So what is the bootleg story in Shanghai? (In New York City, many get sold on the sidewalks, between knock off shoes and other clothing.)
JW: In Shanghai in the evenings when people leave work they set up shop all over town- I'd sometimes grab a movie here and there walking back home from work. I had tossed the DVD onto a big pile. The street vendors aren't hassled by anyone so they set up shop on street corners for several hours during the evening- typically selling out of one or two small open briefcases. The place I used to buy from was a shop- it was a 'fake storefront'- when you walked in there was a woman with a rope who pulled on a section of wall to reveal the real store behind. Tons and tons of DVD- every type of series you can imagine in all sorts of weird combinations- every Sopranos episode in one box, every Star Trek New Generation, all of Palin's Around the World... each one was $1 per disc.
Living/working abroad, was the bootleg watching a way to stay in touch with the culture you grew up with? Especially since many movies never make it there or come out months/years later. Or maybe was the bootleg collecting been a coping mechanism to deal with the new surroundings?
JW: I've not been back to any bootleg shops since about a year ago. I've got a HUGE backlog of DVDs that I've bought and never watched and my customers haven't asked to go.
Have you gotten a sense that the subtitlers are aware of the movie in a cultural sense, so that when they translate they interpret the subtitles in a certain way? From what you've seen, do the Chinese subtitles generally have a certain tone: mechanical, jingositic, other?
From what I've seen, it's only the newest of the new releases that get special subtitle treatment- and not all DVDs either, as the less popular movies will sometimes have subtitles missing or have subtitles from a completely different movie. I wonder if whoever was paid to do the subtitles just swapped in a file from another movie knowing that the pirates couldn't tell the difference.
Of course when the DVDs are released then the pirated DVDs wind up being straight copies with no issues.
So there's a window in which there's demand for subtitles and there aren't any original subtitles/script available for reference. That's when human translation comes in. A lackey gets paid to watch the movie and translate it over to Chinese (or in some cases, Bahasa Indonesian) and then the other subtitles are created from there. If you look at my blog the Rocky Balboa movie got the same sort of treatment.
(http://winterson.com/2007/04/rocky-vi-is-strange-shell-wave.html)
For the lackey to do his job he has to do a fair amount of interpretation. Not only the words being said but the meaning behind them. In Backstoke you can see that sometimes he misheard what was being said (eg. with Yoda's pregnancy vs premonitions) or in other cases he changed the meaning slightly (eg. force becomes 'wish power').
So a fair amount of cultural understanding is needed for the subber to work on the movie.
Take us back to 2005, we're you specifically interested in Star Wars or was it just the latest/greatest?
JW: I've always been a big Star Wars fan. I even queued up in line for Episode 1, which I found to be a bit of a disappointment at the time.
Was there any Star Wars buzz, the hype in the US was palpable, but did the culture over there get that excited? Or just run of the mill, here comes the next American Summer Blockbuster Movie.
JW: Fairly run-of-the-mill. The original trilogy never was launched in a big way in China so kids weren't raised up on it. People did know it was a big movie but they didn't pay any more attention to it than say, Avatar, which was hyped up in China even more.
When you started watching 'star war - the third gathers - backstroke of the west', how did it all settle in, the realization that hey, i've come across something extraordinary?
JW: It wasn't until my sister came to visit and was watching it early one morning that we realized how bad/good the subtitles were.
How far into the movie were you when the realization dawned that it was time to blog?
(http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html & http://winterson.com/2009/01/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west-redux.html)
JW: At the time I was blogging regularly. As soon as I saw how crazy the subtitles were I thought I gotta share it with my friends. Of course I never expected so many people to read that particular blog entry!
Did you have to advertise it's existence at all, or once posted friends and search engines drove traffic organically?
JW: Not at all. In the beginning I posted just 5 or 6 screenshots. A friend told me he would circulate my entry around his office and that's what started the initial traffic, I think. I got people requesting me to post more screenshots so I did it shortly before going on vacation. The next day I found that my website was down due to all the traffic and scrambled to find ways to put it back up. Some readers helped me set things up using the coral cache to reduce bandwidth and I also increased the amount on my account.
How early after posting did the blog fail to handle the traffic?
JW: From memory the first couple of days there was a spike and then it started to come down. Maybe a few thousand people. After I posted the other screenshots I had 50,000 unique visitors overnight. It took me a day to fix things, which wasn't easy as I was traveling overseas and in the meantime a couple of people posted mirrors which for a while got a lot of traffic. In the first couple of weeks there were around 500,000 visitors. Now it's a fairly steady number of about 300-400 per day unless someone new links, in which case it can spike quite a bit.
Then in the weeks after your blog post, you watch the popularity soar. Must have been annoying the number of times you got asked for a copy, any strange people request one?
JW: I like to think that I was allowed to keep Backstroke up because the Star Wars folks have a sense of humor. I got lots of requests to send off a copy of the DVD and only mailed off 2- one of them to someone at LucasArts. =) I took a quick look back at the folks who had requested a copy of Backstroke- a bunch of random ones. Aside from LucasArts there was a guy in Pixar (who apparently represented a few folks who wanted to see the DVD) and a guy in a venture capital firm in California. Most of the requests came within the first week- now I just get a 'comment' every now and then on the website.
What/Where do you think the tipping point was which shifted this into viral mode?
JW: I think people just saw it as something very funny, and as a lot of people know Star Wars there were a lot of people who appreciated it so it got forwarded on and blogged about. Darth Vader's unusual-sounding "Nooooo..." at the end of the movie was already being parodied, and when 'Do not want' came out as the translation people jumped on it. I think it was the YTMND and /b/ folks who got things going, but not totally sure.
Have you followed the 'backstroke of the west's cultural evolution? From subtitle to meme to __INSERT HERE__? Where have you found traces of backstroking influence?
JW: In the beginning I was amazed/shocked at how much traffic my site got. I was constantly searching to see who was saying what about it. I haven't searched for Backstroke stuff in a long time now. 'Do not want' is still very much out there- I stumble across it all the time.
Brief history of 'backstroking' influence:
Most notoriously the 'Do No Want' meme: http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Backstroke_of_the_West
"Oldfags also recognize this film as the origin of DO NOT WANT."
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/DO_NOT_WANT
Also commonly expressed in proper English as; "I find myself desiring not to offend, but I must make clear my severe and vehement dislike for the offered material. I say sir, please kindly remove the offending post and yourself from my sight."
While the original clip spawned a YTMND (http://donotwant.ytmnd.com/) meme, the "Do not want" line was found infinitely more lulzy and has thus spread throughout the internets as one of the most widely used memes.
Gallery of 'Do Not Want' images: http://macrochan.org/search.php?tags=Do+not+want (possibly NSFW)
More Info: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-not-want
5 years later, one bootleg dvd brought about over 500 comments to your blog post, and search engines find over sixty thousand results for 'backstroke of the west', and one of the subsequent meme's 'Do Not Want' finds over 6.5 million images, how crazy is that?
JW: Totally crazy!!!!
Makes me wish I had something worthwhile to say rather than just the random crap on my blog... hahahah....
Do you think the original subtitler will one day surface?
JW: I think the original subtitler has no idea. If I had to guess I think it was probably some student at a lower-tier university in China who was paid a few dollars to translate it from English to Chinese, then a computer was used to make the subtitles in English from the Chinese. That's the only way I can think that the meaning got so twisted but yet still stuck to the subject of the movie.
Very much thanks, Jeremy.
%20
::Extra Info::
For those interested in specific translation interpretations, the following wiki page has explanations of how things possibly got re-subtitled: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_War_The_Third_Gathers:_The_Backstroke_of_the_West
Watch 'backstroke of the west': http://www.youtube.com/user/BackstrokeOfTheWest
dbowgett has superimposed the backstroke subtitles onto the Original Star Wars: http://dbowgett.users.btopenworld.com/
Authentic Audio Backstroke? http://www.youtube.com/user/TheThirdGathers
Real Fake Authentic original Star Wars Engrish subtitle screencaps: http://www.opticalsin.com/sw_engrish/main_anh.html (found 2004)