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feihong wrote: Wed Nov 05, 2025 7:36 am ...
Honestly, some of these new phrases are so generic and inappropriate to the nature of the scene, that they seem like something ChatGPT would produce. I wonder if something like that is being used to generate solutions to translation challenges on the fly? The way scene-specific content gets edited out of these exchanges makes me a little paranoid something like that could be happening.
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dwk wrote: Wed Nov 05, 2025 3:54 pm It is funny you mentioned AI, because the person credited in the booklet for the Hard Boiled subtitle translation is Tim Wong. There is a Tim Wong that founded something called CantoSub AI. No idea if they are the same person.

dwk wrote: Wed Nov 05, 2025 3:54 pm It is funny you mentioned AI, because the person credited in the booklet for the Hard Boiled subtitle translation is Tim Wong. There is a Tim Wong that founded something called CantoSub AI. No idea if they are the same person.

feihong wrote: Wed Nov 05, 2025 7:36 amLines from previous translations like "give a cop a gun and he's a hero; give him two and he's god!" and "I wanted him, and I almost had him! But thanks to you, I'll never have him," are just omitted in favor of much more muted translation choices.

yoloswegmaster wrote: Fri Nov 28, 2025 8:15 pm The Big Heat is a weird one since the action is fantastically done and the gruesomeness sets it apart from other HK action titles from the same time period, but the film itself is just so forgettable. I've seen it twice, including a rewatch from earlier this year, and I can't even remember what the film is about. It also doesn't help with having Waise Lee in the lead role, as he's just wooden and stiff, while Joey Wong is completely underutilized and wasted in a empty role.

feihong wrote: Wed Nov 05, 2025 7:36 am The disc of Hard Boiled looks beautiful, to my untrained eyes, at least. And the subtitles aren't so bad as on Peking Opera Blues. But I'm still pretty surprised they're so proud of the new translations for these releases that they tout them as a feature on the box. Hard Boiled isn't generally so witty a movie as Peking Opera Blues, but there's just an awkwardness to the new translation that makes the film more confusing and graceless-seeming than it ought to be. Just like in Peking Opera Blues, there's a lot of language choices which dampen the feeling a character is presenting or which muddles their previously pretty clear motivations. The fatalism of Mr. Hoi, for instance, is really rendered poorly, and the nihilism of the Johnny Wong character is soft-pedalled. A lot of the film's funny emphasis on the finality of gunplay (funny in the context of the superhuman gunbattles that fill the runtime) is muted in the new subs, too. Lines from previous translations like "give a cop a gun and he's a hero; give him two and he's god!" and "I wanted him, and I almost had him! But thanks to you, I'll never have him," are just omitted in favor of much more muted translation choices. There's some really weird translations for some exchanges. When Tequila tells his commander "if I'd had bullets in my gun I'd have killed a fellow cop tonight!" the commander tells him, "You're exaggerating." I'd think killing someone who was a cop or wasn't a cop couldn't really be a question of degrees––something you could, you know, exaggerate. Pang's answer ought to be "you're wrong," not "you're exaggerating." And later on, the owner of the jazz bar still tells Tequila in response to the photo of Ah Long, "If Pang tells you he's a triad, then he's a cop," which implies Pang has no problem lying to Tequila about who is or isn't undercover.

One of my favorite exchanges in the previous translations is when Tony is interrogating Little Mouse and he asks "if you didn't tell, how did the cops know about our raid?" "I wonder," Mouse says. "There are more cops than crooks in this gang." It's one of the rare cases where this script seems to have a little wit, and in the new translation Mouse says "It's all about money these days, not loyalty. Who can you trust?" Whoever these translators are, they seem allergic to humor, and they seem to really stuggle with how didactic the dialogue should be. I can't wait to see what they've done with The Killer, especially the scene where the cop and the crook give each other childhood nicknames. Honestly, some of these new phrases are so generic and inappropriate to the nature of the scene, that they seem like something ChatGPT would produce. I wonder if something like that is being used to generate solutions to translation challenges on the fly? The way scene-specific content gets edited out of these exchanges makes me a little paranoid something like that could be happening.

****Total Tangent****

I don't know if the new translation really brought this to the fore for me, but I've come to realize that in 30+ years I've never really understood the terms of the conflict in the police station scenes. I read an interview where John Woo said the film was inspired by the same rash of crimes depicted in Long Arm of the Law, and he really emphasizes there the way the cops' guns were outclassed by the firepower of the robbers coming over from the mainland, but the debate between different police methods seems really purely academic here. It's hard to get a fix on what positions are actually expressed, but I guess, adding up the various things Tequila wants over the course of several scenes, he seems to despise the idea of undercover work, and is advocating strongly for the cops to have more firepower in order to fight more heavily-armed crooks. He can, in fact, get that firepower from the armory, but his boss ties his hands. Superintendent Pang, conversely, wants to do, I guess, almost exclusively undercover work, in which he's happy to let his undercover guys kill almost anybody in pursuit of their goals, but he hates sending cops into these situations directly. In both instances, the motivating factor for their positions is this intense, almost physical revulsion at the idea of a cop killing another cop, but is there really much daylight between their positions on this? The debate seems to be settled when Johnny Wong decides to shame Tequila in an emasculating way, and everyone but Tequila decides it's better to risk their lives wasting Johnny than to see Tequila publicly humiliated. Or, in earlier translations, Tequila doesn't despise undercover cops so much as that he just wants to know who they are, and really, if he's a squad commander, there's a pretty good case for letting him know, at least when he's going into an action, . Also, this may just be me, but I don't quite get who is supposed to be the undercover cop in the teahouse shootout? I feel like the visual emphasis in the scene is clearly on Jun Kunimura's taut, humorless face, but seeing it in high-quality here, I think we see another character's picture in the undercover file, some guy who was...maybe at the teahouse shootout, but I don't know that I recognize him. It doesn't seem that, if Kunimura's character is the undercover, he would start the shootout at the teahouse, but who knows really, because the police as an organization seems super cool with Ah Long killing Mr. Hoi by his own hand, in the pursuit of Johnny. And I never really thought of this before, but Superintendent Pang actually shows up for the final showdown essentially "undercover" in a doctor's coat. It's like he's "all-in" for undercover work, at the expense of straightforward police confrontation. Theresa Woo has to scold him for not considering Tequila as important as his precious undercovers, which is just the weirdest climax to this whole confrontation. Then again, both Tequila's and Pang's methods seem to work pretty well in the film, for different purposes. Ah Long succeeds in wiping out Mr. Hoi's triad while undercover, and Tequila's methods break up Johnny Wong's group––in both cases with extreme prejudice, I suppose you'd say, and in both cases through strokes of dumb luck. The cops aren't arresting anybody in this movie. Recalling the bizarrely emphasized debate in the hospital over whether Ah Long shoots a cop during the final police action, it seems like the idea is that undercover work unleavened by straightforward cop tactics doesn't result in cop fatalities––that being the special category of death the film is more preoccupied with than any other (in that way more emphasis in dialogue and scenecraft is spent on cop deaths than criminal or civilian casualities). As if Ah Long had only remained undercover, he would never have shot that cop (of course, he's dressed as one of the villainous hospital security guards in this scene, so by this point he's sort of triple-under-cover). I know none of this really matters, and that the final shootout just kind of dispels all this conflict as fast and carefree as possible, but it is interesting to me how convoluted the text of the film's notional conflict is, given the relative clarity of the conflicts in most of Woo's movies. It's like they were reaching for the same level of interpersonal conflict/appreciation as the killer and the cop have in The Killer, but that relationship was based on a kind of shared appreciation for an extrasocial concept of identity and morality, and it was easy to appreciate the irony inherent in the premise. I don't think the same dichotomy can really exist between the cop cop and the undercover cop. They're part of the same team, but it's the film's very strained premise that they see themselves as being on different teams until the end.

My main issues with City on Fire's subs were tonal, but Peking Opera Blue's are an absolute mess. Whoever did them doesn't understand the language, some lines even having the exact opposite meaning, and they're also completely unfamiliar with the history so it's full of made-up references.

The strangest mistranslation though was how the police are now ticket inspectors. I don't even know how you reach that conclusion. The archaic term used could be misunderstood to mean customs officers if anything, and that would still make more sense than ticket inspectors.

"I’m pleased to announce the 4K releases of two of my more recent films, “Snowden” (2016) and “Savages” (2012), from the always-reliable Shout! Factory, which has taken care of all my films (with the exception of “Platoon,” for which, I’m told, a redo of their last version is in the works, as it was poorly produced – apologies!)."