Silver Emulsion Film Reviews

Before the notes proper, here’s some general things to know about the translation:

The spoken Cantonese subs in the Chinese/English stacked subs are not meant to be used as Chinese subs for Mandarin speakers. They’re there for my VHS nostalgia & in case any Cantonese speakers want to see what I was translating from.

These notes are meant as a sort of appendix to the subtitles themselves, and ideally would be referenced after viewing the film (or during, if you feel like pausing). I think some jokes will be missed without the additional context in these notes, but I have tried to make the subs as contained as they can possibly be. There’s probably other jokes that I completely missed, as well, but I can’t do anything about that.

There are a few untranslated lines here and there throughout the movie, and these are mostly in crowd scenes. I did my best, but some were just too obscured by other sounds to hear with my novice ear. There’s also a few Cantonese-only lines that I just couldn’t figure out for similar reasons. Just know that I diligently attempted to do each and every one of these, but at a certain point I had to just move on from them. I can only ram my head into the wall so many times. I definitely could have just put whatever characters I thought I heard together and call it a day, but I didn’t want to start “hallucinating” like Whisper sometimes does. In any case, all of these lines are seemingly minor within the context of the film, although a Cantonese speaker may eventually prove me wrong on that!

In terms of romanizing names, I initially wanted to use Jyutping. It was the romanization method that I learned while doing this work, and I found it to be the easiest to look at and pronounce. The problem comes when people known to martial arts fans, such as Fong Sai-Yuk 方世玉 become Fong Sai-Juk. So in general, I tried to keep the readability of Jyutping, while adjusting certain instances like this to be more seamless for English speakers. One thing that bothers me is when Mandarin pronunciations are used in subs and it doesn’t match what is being said, so I tried to avoid that.

Names with a slang meaning I tried to put the meaning into the subs, where space allowed. More details below at the characters’ first appearance. The villain characters are an interesting conundrum, as they are mostly named after other movies. I wrestled with whether I should just have their name as spoken, translate it into a nickname, or simply put the referenced film’s English title. In keeping with the idea of bringing forward the film’s comedy to the English speaker, I think choosing to include the film title works the best in most cases.

Obviously, it would be impossible for me to do this without some errors. But just know I put a ton of time into this, and I think I did pretty good. I’m sure the Internet will let me know if I didn’t!

One final thing before we get to the actual translation notes: When including the Jyutping next to the Chinese characters below, I did not include the tone numbers because I don’t think this should be used as a real reference. I am just including these romanizations for some reading ease, and if you’re so inclined you can search the Chinese characters in CantoDict or other dictionaries to learn the tones for whatever you’re interested in.

And now the notes!

How I translated The Reckless Cricket is quite a lengthy answer. Before going into detail, I will put it simply. I used the Whisper (speech-to-text) function embedded within Subtitle Edit to provide a basis of Chinese text, which I manually checked, corrected, and then translated with the help of a variety of Cantonese dictionaries (listed below). Even simpler: Whisper threw the alley-oop, I dunked it. Typing it out in a single sentence makes it sound so much easier than it actually was, and whether or not I actually dunked it remains to be seen!

Also, yes, Whisper is an AI model, but as it’s just a program creating text from speech, I’m not sure it really qualifies as “AI.” Sure, it learns as it goes, but after working with it for 16 months, I don’t know how intelligent it really is. My point is that while Whisper opened up the possibility of doing this translation, my Natural Intelligence (NI) was a required part of the process. I did not just run Whisper and then plug the results into a translation program; I manually checked and translated everything myself. So before anyone dismisses this as an “AI translation,” I think, if anything, I actively proved that AI alone cannot handle something as delicate as this. This translation was achieved through the combination of AI and NI, with the mindset of a librarian using trusted resources to accurately deliver required information. I believe the power of the human mind is limitless if we set our sights on a goal and we use the correct tools.

For anyone checking out now: I’m sure I missed things. I’m sure there are still errors here and there in the translation. I believe it’s mostly correct, and I did my best to verify what I thought I heard against what Whisper heard. I won’t really know how successful I was until/if Cantonese speakers watch the movie. The main subtitle file includes stacked Spoken Cantonese and English subtitles, so it should be relatively easy to see where or how I went wrong. If you speak Cantonese and you see an error or something I missed, kindly let me know if you’d like. All the time and energy I put into this translation was out of pure love and admiration for Hong Kong, its people and their cinema, and I want to make sure that is evident right up front. I have loved Hong Kong movies for over 25 years now, and this endeavor is my strange way of trying to give back and preserve this forgotten film in its original Cantonese language.

Even though this was unlike anything I have ever attempted, like the 爛頭蟀 “Reckless Cricket,” I refused to give up, no matter what!

Now for the extremely long-winded version!