PC Translations

A few months ago, when I was visiting my family in the US, I had a quiet space of time in the middle of the night while waiting for my flight… everyone else was asleep, but I wanted to stay awake in order to avoid jetlag. I flipped through the channels to see what I could find to keep me awake, and stumbled across The Lady from Shanghai. I’d forgotten all about it until I was ordering some DVDs for my Shakespeare course (I know, a weird way to stumble across it again, but that’s another story).

I am not usually a film noir afficiando. But I did have fun stopping to catch this one, and it was certainly better than sitting through hundreds of game shows while I waited for my flight.

I don’t think I could ever get to be a real film noir fan either. But one thing I did notice, particularly as I thought back on it with this blog in mind (it is, after all, supposed to be about translations and things), was how easily film noir translates from one culture to another. While it is true that it has its conventions and all, it still is an easy to read genre, relatively speaking. It isn’t that hard to break the code, so to speak.

Perhaps that is why it can’t survive. A code too easily broken ceases to be interesting.