Lost ... But Not In Translation

As a family we sat down and watched the epic TV program Lost last night. Yu-Jin had been bugging me for a few days to watch the show with the man in the tree and I had no idea what he was talking about as I haven't seen a great deal of anything on the tv of late. It just so happened that there was a body in a tree following a plane wreck on a deserted, or so we think, island. Nice premise.

I didn't want him to stay up too late and he fell asleep after less than 20 minutes anyway. But he did see what he wanted to see.

Getting to the translation bit. There is a Korean couple that were on the plane, strangely enough, and they don't speak any English. The girl even said so in Korean. Interestingly there are no subtitles and the audience has to work out from their body language, more than anything, what they are saying. It is a bit unfair that I have an interpreter right here but their dialogue was so basic I knew pretty much everything they said. Reading between the lines of course - just the main words. More to the point, Miky said, "That guy's not Korean. His Korean is ok though." Looking at the guy his ancestory is definitely Korean but he doesn't have the accent. I would say that he was born in the US and can speak Korean well enough but hasn't lived with too many native speakers, or not enough of them to get the dialect. The girl is a star in Korea so she had the accent.

I wonder what people who don't understand any Korean were thinking. Probably, who are these Chinese and what the hell are they talking about?

People are going to hear more about the Koreans in the near future. Well, North Korea has just announced that it is a Nuclear Power. I bet they are busy writing speeches for George Dubya now - they couldn't have him adlibbing and appearing to be a blithering, wandering, mindless idiot. Oh, perhaps he does write his own speeches, in that case.