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Shang-Chi and the legend of the ten rings is a bilingual movie, which makes it an outlier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. List of movie characters who are not fluent in multiple languages would be easier than listing those that are, as writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton didn’t shy away from portraying the heroes of Shang-Chi speak in the language that best matches the scene, even if that involved a lot of subtitles.
“It all comes from a logical character-based decision,” he told Playserver. “The idea is that [Shang-Chi and Xu Xialing’s father, Wenwu] can speak any language he wants and he teaches several languages to his children. So we have scenes that involve that; that they are able to switch between English and Chinese.
And how do you decide which pivotal moments in the film would be in English, and which in Mandarin?
“It was always a discussion, ‘What makes the most sense to these characters? When would they speak one language and when would they speak another? and we tried to stick to those rules throughout the film.
Shang-Chi was sort of a crash course in what the director called ‘the art of subtitling’ – and multilingual viewers pointed out the poetry in the languages of the film that was not incorporated into the English text in the screen. Cretton thanks production translator and Mandarin dialect coach Nova Zheng for her work.
“There is no direct translation between two languages,” Cretton told Polygon. “There is an art in what we put on the screen in English. The best translation – sometimes it’s poetic, sometimes it’s slightly different from what Chinese words say. It was a great learning experience for me. I just tried to approach everything with as much respect and curiosity as possible. I feel really happy to have been surrounded by really smart people who helped me make this on screen like the right thing.
Shang-Chi is now available in theaters, and Disney has announced plans to release the film on its Disney Plus streaming service 45 days after September 3, the film’s theatrical release date. You can read more about this latest installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how the character was born here.
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