General Information
“Lost in translation” is one of the best American romantic comedies. Being produced by talented and experienced Sofia Coppola, this film has a deep meaning and presents issues in relations of people and issues with translating English language, revealing various translating issues that include the grammatical structure, sentence structure, and others. The movie was professionally written and directed and starred in popular Hollywood actors, collecting a significant number of awards and nominations in the USA and abroad.
Plot
The plot of the film is unusual and captivating. The movie tells the story of a married man, who experiences a midlife crisis and a young married woman, who feels separated from the active and interesting life of her famous husband. As a matter of fact, her life with her husband differs considerably from the life she expected, and that is the reason this woman starts new relations with the protagonist. Thus, two lonely souls meet each other in a hotel in Tokyo and build strong relations full of love, trust, and care. In this way, the title of the film “Lost in translation” is related not only to the language structure or sentence structure of English and Japanese languages but also to the difficulties in relations between people. In this way, it is possible to say that the title of the movie “Lost in translation” has a double meaning, forcing the audience to overthink these words over and over again. Therefore, the main theme of the film is a translation of the words and feelings.
Translation Issues
The main character of the video is a movie star whose mother tongue is English. For that reason, he experiences a lot of difficulties in communication with people in the hotel and at work as it is almost impossible for him to express himself with English words and transmit a true meaning of them to the locals. In this way, the words have significant power as they can influence the life of the protagonist and his relations with the Japanese. In addition, at work, all the words he says are also lost in translation because the interpreter is not professional and does not translate the meaning properly. As a result, well-developed and informative sentences and sentence structures of the director are interpreted as several sharp words that transmit half of the initial meaning. However, because the grammatical structure of the English language is different from the grammatical structure of the Japanese language, it is quite difficult for Bob to understand even a single word by the director. At the same time, he understands that the interpreter does not translate his words properly, building sentences with a simple structure or just translating long expressions on only several words.
In this way, the romantic film “Lost in translation” present to the audience the translating issues of the modern time. It happens that the translators and interpreters translate the words and sentence structures in one simple sentence or even one word. For sure, this word does not include the whole specter of emotions, feelings, and descriptive elements of the initial sentence, making people be literally lost in translation. Therefore, the translators should pay attention to every single word and translate them in correspondence to the requirements because even one word can influence the situation significantly or introduce a new tone to the literary work.
Taking into account the issues in translation from Japanese to English and vice versa and issues in relations between people, it is possible to conclude that “Lost in translation” is one of the best films by the talented American director Sofia Coppola. It perfectly transmits the challenges and difficulties in communication between people from different cultures and in different situations. Thus, the protagonist appears in Tokyo, managing to deal with his midlife crisis, and the woman he meets also is not satisfied with her husband and their marriage in general. Both of them are located in the country of a completely different culture, and this factor makes them even closer than all their problems in personal life. This situation is a perfect background for various translation issues where the words of Bob and his director are translated improperly, provoking misunderstandings and disappointments. In this way, the romantic movie allows the viewers to observe how difficult and challenging it is to deal with the interpretation of other people’s feelings and words, especially when they belong to a different culture and are incapable to understand a single word in English. Thus, “Lost in translation” transmits the atmosphere of the foreign country, in confidence in relations between a husband and a wife, and a strong desire of a person to be understood and interpreted in a right way. For that reason, the title of the movie has a double meaning and is thought-provoking to the audience, revealing important issues of the modern time.
