Transmediating race and senses through subtitling in translanguaging classroom

Abstract

This article reflects on a transdisciplinary curricular project in a Japanese language course that employs audio–visual subtitling to promote students’ critical literacies in languages, cultures, and media. Drawing on Nornes’s (2015) notion of “sensuous subtitling,” which embraces the incorporation of the “materiality of language” into translation, we present how students’ experimental subtitlings potentially make a transformative intervention into how the characters are sensed and felt through film viewing. As Japanese-speaking women teaching Japanese language and culture at an English-speaking university in Canada, we use our bodies as racialized and racializing sites to explore the affective potentials of interlingual subtitles and their pedagogical implications. We reflect on students’ subtitling of Korean Japanese film Where Is the Moon (1993, dir. Yoichi Sai) that embodies race and senses through various cinematic techniques. Students’ subtitlings reshaped the “intercorporeal” space in which the cinematic bodies of the characters touch our bodies (Sekimoto and Brown, 2020).