Cultural competency goes beyond language and involves an understanding of the cultural, social, and historical contexts in which a language is used.
Today a lot of streaming services are offering shows from all over the world. So often, when non English shows are subtitled into a target language, English functions as the intermediary or pivot language that translators rely on in their translation. This is a common practice by agencies primarily because it is easier to find translators who can work with English as one of the languages in a language pair.
Despite access to pivot language, translators should equip themselves with cultural knowledge of the source language and go the extra mile to study it, particularly focusing on sociolinguistic features such as pronoun use, honorific terms, kinship terms, politeness levels etc.. Yes, this is especially relevant to Asian languages.
When translating subtitles for J and K-dramas, I find that English templates tend to miss some sociolinguistics cues that audience are supposed to catch! It's understandable that English templates have real constraints that they have to work around but we also need to acknowledge that English is sociolinguistically and socioculturally simpler than most Asian languages/cultures. For example, Korean 'ahjumma' would directly translate to 'mak cik' in Malay but English templates would have it as 'Ms. XYZ'. If a Malay translator solely relies on the English translation and ignores the source term ‘ahjumma', the Malay audience would receive 'Puan XYZ', which is significantly detached from the original concept. 'Ahjumma' and 'mak cik' are comparable – casual, relatively friendlier than 'Ms.' or 'Puan'.
The same goes for 'oppa'. There’s one time where a K-drama female lead calls her personal assistant ‘Oppa’ and the scene is supposed to make the male lead think that the assistant is her boyfriend (while it’s actually because he's someone older and close). However, the plot is missing in the English translation because the woman calls him ‘Mr. XYZ’, which does not indicate closeness nor intimacy. This is a plot waste, which I managed to save throughout the show by paying attention to Korean honorifics and kinship terms to match them with those of Malay since we share a lot of sociolinguistic/cultural features. So, Korean 'oppa' is Malay 'abang' (for elder brothers/older males/when flirtatious etc).
We need to also observe the level of formality demonstrated in the original language so that we can use the appropriate and corresponding pronouns. If we rely solely on the English pronouns (I-you), we’re gonna be scratching our heads, deciding which pronoun pair to use in our language.
Well I wish I could go on to unpack this topic further but this has already been a long one. I didn’t get to address many other Asian languages but feel free to share how your language works when it comes to complex social dynamics. Is English always reliable?
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