South Africa has eleven official languages, official as in "enshrined in the constitution", but the lingua franca is definitely English, which is great for lazy anglophone foreigners like me. However the other languages are very much in use - and it's impressive how everyone here takes for granted that very many people - perhaps a majority of the population - can slip from one language to another. One of the drivers at work can apparently speak all eleven official languages, which is an impressive feat by any standards.
SA television deals with this in an interesting way - programmes in non-English languages are mostly subtitled in English, even when the characters in the programmes are themselves slipping in and out of English. It's completely normal for a sitcom in (say) Zulu to shift into English for a few sentences, then back again, sometimes because an English-speaker comes into the scene, and sometimes between the Zulu-speakers themselves, for no particular reason. There are a lot of borrowed English words in the other languages anyway, e.g. when the subtitle says "why are you so worried about this", the actor is saying "ksdfpoujsd oiusdfknsd oisdjdij f sfoi worry?" (or something like that).
SA television has also found an innovative way to deal with the issue of swear words on TV (e.g. in American cop films, where swearing is endemic to the point of boredom) - the soundtrack is simply deleted for the split-second when the actor is swearing. This makes for a curiously restful listening experience, when the cop (or villain), clearly in a highly emotional state, shouts, for example, "Give me the (pause) gun, you (pause) (pause)!"
1 comment:
This reminds me of my experience of watching subtitled cinema in Portugal in 1977, when everything was subtitled and, subtly, censored. I'll never forget Robert De Niro losing it in Taxi Driver and seeing the subtitle ribbon repeat Caramba! until he'd finished. Of course, the one English word everyone in Portugal understood perfectly was fuck.
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