[...] Seo-rae is a Chinese woman who speaks Korean at an advanced, but not native level. Park could have inserted the occasional grammatical error into her speech, but he chose not to (in contrast to the text messages sent by her second husband in the latter part of the film, which are filled with typos to comic effect). Seo-rae's word choices are unexpected, and she speaks in a slightly archaic manner to express the fact that she learned much of her Korean by watching costume dramas on TV. The end result is dialogue that feels unusual, slightly awkward but highly expressive in its own way. I'm not sure if my translation fully captures this quality of her speech, but I tried my hardest, from the charmingly stilted (“In Korea, if a person you love gets married, does the love cease?”) to the weirdly poetic (“Because those bleeding photos are screaming wildly”).
Sometimes, discussions with the director are about what is added in translation, rather than what is lost. In one scene, Seo-rae speaks a line in Chinese to the neighborhood cat. Hae-joon records it on his phone, and runs it through a translation app which renders it as, "If you wish to give me a present, bring me the simjang of that kind detective." Simjang in Korean means “heart,” but in the sense of the bodily organ, rather than a metaphorical sense. Hae-joon is disturbed and a bit alarmed by this request, and later asks Seo-rae about it directly. She answers that it was a mistranslation; the Chinese word she spoke should be properly rendered as maeum (the metaphorical sense of the word “heart”).
How does one capture all this in the English subtitles? As much as I liked the sound of the phrase, "Bring me the heart of that kind detective," it sounded too metaphorical, rather than the menacing undercurrent that the scene required. After a lengthy discussion, we decided that having the translation app confuse the words “head” and “heart” might be the least bad option. Thus the subtitle, "Bring me the head of that kind detective." "Everyone's going to think you’re referencing Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," I said to Park. A long pause followed, before he answered, "Very well." (Park is, after all, a devoted Sam Peckinpah fan.)
