oscars in taiwan

thanks to the 2/28 memorial day long weekend, i think this year is the first year since moving to taiwan that i've gotten to watch the oscars at the same time they were airing in the states. usually it's on monday morning for us here. they also broadcast it here on the monday evening as well, which is really nice, but i can never manage to stay up late enough to watch the best parts -- best actor/actress, best director, and best picture. but since today is a holiday, we got to watch most of the show this morning. pretty sweet! and now i don't have to avoid going on facebook where i often accidentally find out the outcome from people's statuses -- one annoying aspect of watching important shows 12 hours later than all my american friends.

of course the first (morning) telecast, since it's broadcasting almost simultaneously, doesn't have chinese subtitles. but the one in the evening always does. this fact has always impressed me. i always think of the translators who must work pretty much 12 hours straight, interpreting and adding the subtitles to the show. not an easy job, especially considering all of the jokes that are told, many of which can get lost in the cross-cultural context. and think of all those names to translate -- most big hollywood stars already have set chinese names that most people are familiar with (some of which are ridiculously long -- up to 8 characters, like leonardo dicaprio's name. most people's names are only 3 characters, so western names translated in this way can look very long. but they're in the own category, i guess.) but on the telecast there's also tons of other names to translate -- film editors, documentary directors, animators -- that's a lot of work to transliterate their names as well. so today, my hat is off to all the dedicated, bilingual people who are working hard right now, as i type, to translate the oscar show into chinese. well done.