what a brave corporate logo!

[bossymarmalade]

This article in Feministe about the Telephone video is really pissing me off. In general because of the smug, insistent pedantry of it (look, just because the song's called "Telephone" it doesn't mean EVERY SINGLE EVENT must then revolve around the telephone; also, that is a honey bun and not a sandwich, idiot; also you are a fucking feminist writer and should know why it's not on to refer to the vulva as a "vagina"; also if you did the minimum of goddamn research you could refer to Gaga's partner in the prison yard as trainer Heather Cassils instead of "Very Friendly Smoking-Hot Butch Lady"), but in particular because of this:

And was it really necessary to subtitle the Asian woman's thoughts in a different language than everybody else's? No. No, it was not! I am not so cool with the ways that this video deals with race, I think. I mean, Beyonce's there, and presented as an equal and partner. Sure. But I am thinking like, this Asian girl and her special "hey, have you noticed this chick's Asian? Just thought I'd point that one out to you" subtitle ....

Hey there, did it ever occur to you that Asian women sometimes think and speak IN ASIAN LANGUAGES?!? Maybe she's thinking "a different language than everybody else's" (nice) because, hmmm, she has access to a "different language than everybody else". What's so wrong with her using it, or -- horror of horrors! -- reflexively reacting with it in her own mind? Is this a fucking performance sport?

This is a discourse that especially pisses me off as a diasporado, because as you all well know there are a TON of issues about many of us being systematically denied access to our source-tongues. I would *love* to be able to bust out cusswords or whatever in Hindi, even for my private unspoken reactions. Sometimes I feel like among Western white society, being an Anglophone when your source-language is a non-Romance one is taken as a sign of "goodness", like you're safer, more model of a minority, more assimilated; the reaction from Canadian white folks when I tell them, "no, I only speak English", is always one of surprise and approval. (It's a different story with Canadian brown people, but I'm not getting into that right now.)

So yes, maybe it *was* necessary to subtitle the Japanese woman's thoughts in Japanese in this context. Or did you assume that nobody watching the video would be able to understand those characters, so it was purely an exercise in exotification? Was her sudden Japanese subtitle making her Asianness a little too visible? Don't translate your own discomfort over the inscrutability (yes, I went there) of those characters into some generalizing "NO FOREIGN LANGUAGES PLZ" declaration for all of Western media, thank you.

Comments

[bossymarmalade]

Oooh, does it really say "dress"? I wasn't sure if the commenters were reliable translators, and not being able to read Japanese myself, I couldn't say.

To me (which I readily admit might be hopeful reading-in and not Gaga's actual intent) it doesn't really matter what the English translation of the Japanese woman's text is, because if we Anglophones were supposed to understand what she was thinking *it would be in English*. I mean, they've got to know that Japanese-speakers would see the video, right?

[torachan]

Yeah, it says wan piisu (one piece), which is the word for dress. And btw, it's katakana, not kanji.

And yeah, it seems odd to me that they wouldn't consider the fact that Japanese-speakers are going to see this. So they must have realised people would be able to read it and still chose something totally random.

I mean, it's a fine line between "it doesn't matter if you know what they're saying because it's not important for you to know" and "it doesn't matter, so just put any old thing". Like in Avatar: The Last Airbender, they have all the text in Chinese and it does actually mean what it says. They didn't just slap up a bunch of random Chinese characters every time they wanted text (or even worse, in the movie where it's replaced by gibberish, not even Chinese at all).

Now I'm curious to see reactions from Japanese fans. *makes a note to google after work is done*

[bossymarmalade]

Whoops! I was trying not to write "kanji" anywhere because I can't tell the difference, but I slipped up there. Thanks for pointing it out!

I hope at some point an interviewer asks either Gaga or Jonas Ackerlund about the Japanese in the video, so we can find out for sure what (if any) thought went into that bit. Hell, somebody with a Twitter account could probably ask, heh!

Now I'm curious to see reactions from Japanese fans.

If you find anything particularly keen, please do link away!

[torachan]

I didn't see any real discussion on it (I only did a quick google as I'm still supposed to be working!), but there was a lot of "what does this mean?" kind of comments. One I liked was "is she referring to the dress or the anime?" XD General confusion and curiosity seemed to be the main reaction.

[ciderpress]

I thought ワンピース was meant to be a reference to the ridiculously popular shonen manga. There were so many cultural/popculture references in the video (star wars reference, yay!) and one piece is so popular in the US and generally Europe anyway, I thought it was there to give a nod to the Japanese speaking people and manga geeks, ymmv. The other thing that jumped out at me re: language was that the scrolling text in the CNN(?) bulletin was Swedish. I think they're meant to be the lyrics to Telephone but my Swedish is minimal so don't quote me on that!

[bossymarmalade]

Having been required to read a random volume of One Piece for review, I would certainly use it as an expletive. *g*

[ciderpress]

ahahhaha! My nephews love it so much -- from their summaries, all I can tell is that it's about social justice seeking pirates who are trying to take down the World Government? Or something!

Why is it that white people reflexively think it's up to them if we're there and when we're there and *how* we're there? Even talking about our poor Asian lady objectification, it's not about our thoughts and our opinions and perception or our reality, it's that she's policing what Asian women do or don't do and how that should be represented. It's still ignoring us! What's up with that?

[torachan]

It could be. That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, either, but it doesn't make any less sense than randomly putting "dress" up there. XD

[m_nivalis]

From the screenshot I saw, it's a Swedish translation of the lyrics.

(here via friendsfriendsfriends, in case you wonder)

[lilacsigil]

Yeah, that's what I thought, too. It's hardly the weirdest thing in the video, but at the same time, there's such a long history of random [insert language] in English-language media that this seems a bit odd.