You never know where Plugged In might show up. We’re on your computer. We’re on your phone. And if you don’t understand a word I’m saying right now because you only speak Arabic, we’ve got that covered now too.
Plugged In has a site for the Middle East, dedicated to dealing with pertinent entertainment issues that Arabic-speaking Christians might encounter. We have a site in Spanish, too, and my boss tells me that some of the movie reviews we produce in video form are subtitled in Chinese.
I wonder how hard our translators have to work to make what we do more culturally relevant for their audience. When I think about my reviews, there are times when my editor barely understands them—much less someone who speaks a different language. I don’t think our blog is being translated into another language, but if it was, I’m pretty sure the horrible puns that occasionally show up in Movie Monday would be, quite literally, lost in translation. (Which might be just as well.)
But the folks in charge of translating our work are more than just familiar with another language. They know the culture. And that’s important. If you don’t understand the culture of the people you’re trying to reach, it’s gonna be awfully hard to reach them.
Missionaries understand this intuitively, I think, but not everyone does. When I was a reporter for a local newspaper here in Colorado Springs, I talked with a Muslim who was offended by a Christian textbook that tried to explain Islam to evangelical readers. The man didn’t take offense that such a book was out there: He had grown up around Christians and even had gone to a Christian school. He understood our culture well and appreciated it. But the writers of this particular text didn’t understand his at all, he said. And as a result, he said the text was riddled with errors that some Muslims would find either laughable or offensive.
You hear about cross-cultural miscommunications all the time. The “peace” sign is considered an offensive gesture in some English commonwealth countries—the equivalent of flipping someone off. Ditto a thumbs-up sign in Iran. Nod your head up and down to a Bulgarian, and he’ll take it as a “no.” In 2010, British prime minister David Cameron—visiting China at the time—wore a poppy as a boutonniere, a traditional way that the British honor their fallen war heroes. But for the Chinese, who fought bitter (and disastrous) Opium Wars against the British over that self-same poppy, the flower has a distinctly different meaning.
And it makes me wonder whether a cultural divide is also at work in our movies—and why Christians, especially evangelical Christians, often look so weird in them.
Evangelical Christianity is a culture all unto its own. We are different, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We even, truth be told, often speak a different language. (Just the simple phrase, “The Lord told me to do this,” might make some wonder about our sanity. I’ve been in this culture for most of my life, and I still don’t think I have the lingo down. As much as we try to reach out to other people, our own culture can feel, to an outsider, pretty insular at times. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised when the Christians we see on movies and television feel so dissonant to our own experiences. Many of the people writing the dialogue for such characters just don’t know very much about us. They don’t necessarily know what to make of us or how to please us.
And guess what? The reverse is also true. We have a hard time understanding how to communicate our great truths in a way that’s resonant to a suspicious secular world. And the result, I think, shows up in our movies. Secular Hollywood gives us Noah and doesn’t quite understand why so many Christians hated the thing. Christians trot out an insightful little movie like The Identical and are bewildered that it got a 7% “freshness” rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
When it comes to better understanding our disparate cultures, we could both use a little help.
Which is no reason to stop trying. We Christians know we have an important truth that the world needs to hear, and it’s important to try to convey that truth as best we can. And with practice and effort, we are getting better. As much as we can, we need to communicate to the “outside” world why we’re a little different—why certain things are important to us, why we recoil from certain aspects of the culture and so on. We don’t need to compromise our values or our faith to fit the culture, but we do need to better communicate why we’re different.
Recent Comments