Hello,
I follow your posts for a while now. They really making my day! Want to thank you for that first.
So I just wanted to add some thoughts to the subbing discussion here. Thanks to you I just started another Love by Change re-watch. As you mentioned in another post the Youtube and Viki subs in Englisch are quite good here. (For YT JayBL‘s english subs are just amazing just adoring the subber until now.)
But I just realised again how great the german ones are! The subbing group not only explained the usage of P‘, khrab and sawadee . They also managed to convey the more informal/partly rude way of talking by Ae and the more formal way by Pete. That‘s so astonishing! That‘s also why LBC is one of the rare cases of BL I watch with german subs. (Well besides there aren‘t so many BL‘s with Ger sub for now. But Viki is on it.)
Actually the ger and eng LBC subs on YT inspired me to provide ger subs myself for Gameboys and partly UWMA. It wasn‘t an easy task, but so fulfilling. It made me quite sensible for subs now. The ones on Netflix for example are my personal nightmare. It seems to me the translators there are generalising a lot.
I was thinking, if with the existence of fan-made subs, so people who care to explain linguistics (like honorific’s, idioms, pronouns, etc.) in that specific cultural background and even keep them in the translation, a new group of bl consumers are growing up now, accepting the mixture of language or even create in the bl-fandom bubble a new transnational language? (Sorry the german in me got the better part of me here on sentence length‘s…)
OMG thank you for this. That is so cool to know about the German subs!!!
BL: Subs, Captions, Niche Fandom Languages, Jargon, Linguistics, Epistemology, Global Shared passions and so forth....
well sheeet, that title almost turned into a JSTOR article title..
a new group of bl consumers are growing up now, accepting the mixture of language or even create in the bl-fandom bubble a new transnational language
I love this! And yes it does feel like it’s happening.
I makes me think about adoption of the term tsundere into the lexicon around anime in the 80s and 90s and now geeky fandom, or kishotenketsu among the literary sets.
There’s a lot of niche fandoms that adopt terms, and those terms become global lexicon.
It happens in academia and in concentrated work environments as well. You get to the point of specialization where you can have whole conversations with someone, using entirely technical terminology (think about programming languages, for example) as a lingo localized to a subject matter (rather than region). I’ve had these conversations with colleagues who don’t speak English. Like the verbs are different, but the terms are global. This can happen at conference or a convention or amongst staff on a movie set, or in a post production room. The way sound tech people talk to each other is like... whoah, what did you just say?!?
I can get this way around BL tropes where I just throw a term out there (like pratfall kiss, or there’s only one bed) and I just assume everyone here knows what the hell I’m talking about.
I’m sure the linguists have a technical term for this kind of language, like a combination of auxlang + jargon, but I don’t know it.
It makes me think a lot about the IRL evolution of Wittgenstein's private language, and how his (argued) innate unintelligible nature is counteracted by the moment of adoption into a small group. But that an outsider unfamiliar with the source subject matter would still hear it as primarily gobbledygook. (One of my minors is in epistemology.)
I think an even bigger version of the specific aspect you’re zeroing in on, is already happening around Korean via Hallyu (especially Kpop & Kdramas). And not just phrases like “stan” and “bias” and “bias wrecker” or sasaeng, hyung, and maknae, but whole linguistic concepts that run adjacent to these ideas around social structure and fandom.
I'm finding, just in normal every day conversation with native English speakers (yes, this is the kind of thing I talk about regularly in my workspace) that I have to explain what a "linguistic register" means less and less these days, particularly to those younger than me.
It's kinda awesome.
I suspect Hallyu is partly behind this, but also the general nature of growing up with globalization and the internet age. (Not to mention my own propensity to gravitate towards geeky types who are fans of more niche aspects of a greater fandom, and thus are, by their nature, increasingly global in an effort to connect with those few others who share their obsession.)
Here’s an example of a jargon rich sentence:
I don’t really stan a tsundere uke who's the maknae of the found family group, I like it when they flip the power play of the age dynamics or make him more of a sunshine cinnamon roll, although I forgive everything for Taiwanese chemistry and an “only one bed” trope.
Now you can tell me whether you understood it or if I cross hatched too many of my fandom jargons at once.
On a completely different note:
Here's a really interesting podcast ep from 99% Invisible on captions and captioning.
(source)
