Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Into the Night of Language Diversity

Into the Night is a 2020 Belgian Netflix-original series (apparently inspired by the Polish sci-fi novel The Old Axolotl [beware the Amazon Affiliate link!], although I see very little resemblance myself; it feels to me more like an SCP Tale in the 001 Daybreak canon, just without the shambling blob monsters), which has an ensemble cast of characters from a wide range of linguistic backgrounds--and it fully embraces that fact! There is no single language shared by all of the characters (although between French and English we have them all covered), and no on-screen translation convention; everyone is portrayed as speaking the language they would really be speaking at any given moment. The official language of the series as indicated by Netflix is French, and that does seem to be the most common language spoken throughout the series (which is sensible, given that the story starts in Belgium), but I'm not actually sure it's a majority--and if it is, it's clear that other languages are not treated as second-class. If you don't turn on the subtitles, you have to just know every language that's spoken in order to follow the plot; like War & Peace, it does not have a primary language with affordances to make secondary languages accessible--it just is fully multilingual. As such, there is not much to say about the techniques it uses for language affordance; it's just subtitled! You could maybe make an argument for a couple cases of Making It Obvious, but they're not really trying; and I can think of one case of diagetic translation, but that's because the original speaker was mumbling and would've been unintelligible otherwise regardless of the audience's linguistic prowess.

Unlike War & Peace, however, the sheer diversity of languages represented on screen (French, English, Flemish, Russian, Arabic, Italian, Turkish, German, and a throwaway bit of Mandarin right at the beginning) means that you can't actually expect any significantly-sized audience to actually know all of them. No matter who is watching, you will need subtitles at some point--so Into the Night just goes all out and subtitles everything, uniformly. So, given a sufficient number of subtitle tracks, it does not need to assume its audience speaks any of the featured languages--the viewer can pick whatever linguistic representation they need, without changing the video. At the moment, Netflix only offers subtitles in English, French, and Chinese, but all three language groups are in pretty much the same boat. Which leads me to the intriguing conclusion that this is a bit of story-telling media with no primary narrative languages.

Now, there are ways of telling stories with no spoken or written language at all--wordless picture books, mime shows, LEGO assembly instructions--and that's a whole interesting area of study to get into on its own. Heck, you could probably do interesting stuff with a series of statuary forming 3D "frames", although I don't know of any examples myself. And if that interests you, I must recommend the work of Dr. Neil Cohn, the Visual Linguist, and his Visual Language Lab, which looks at conventions of graphical representation and how they support storytelling either in conjunction with or in absence of written language across different cultures.

But that's not really my thing. My thing is explicitly analyzing the narrative use of secondary languages. And while, as I have just explained, Into the Night doesn't really do the secondary language thing, the way that it manages to not do it is fascinating. I can't imagine that this is the first bit of media to do something like this, but it's the first one I've noticed, and it just blows my mind, even if for no other reason that helping to better define the boundaries of my area of interest. And what it is doing is something that I just cannot imagine working very well in any other medium. You could imagine, for example, a multilingual opera with the libretto printed in a variety of languages in the play book for the audience to follow along, but that suffers from dividing the audience members' attention between page and stage. I am told that modern opera productions sometimes display the translations on screens for the audience, but then you are implicitly choosing a privileged language for at least that performance--the whole audience, regardless of background, is forced to rely on a single language chosen for the cinematic captions. And since subtitling relies on multimodal perception, or at least multichannel perception--you can read the subtitles while listening to the actors' spoken dialog, or read subtitles in your foveal vision while remaining aware of signing on another part of the screen (although Into the Night in particular does not happen to feature any sign language), you really can't do it in print or audio. (Although, perhaps the War & Peace trick of having a audience-language foreground track superimposed over a uniform diagetic language background track might work for audio format? I don't know how annoying that would get if used so continuously; someone should try it!) This form of storytelling is something that is just fantastically well suited to the very specific medium of home-viewed video with selectable subtitles. It's not specifically a streaming video thing; you could imagine this being done on DVD, for example. But has anyone?

So, anyway. That's a thing you can do with video, apparently.

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