David Buchanan on the same topic—a personal piece about how one goes about helping viewers understand the language being spoken on screen:
We pay close attention not only to the meaning of the words, but to the actors’ emotions, the cadence of their speech, their body language, the themes and narrative structure of the script, the historical period, and the social context. Together, these cues provide a host of tiny hints, all of which add extra layers of meaning and must be accounted for in the translation. Translating all these layers is a bit like solving a Rubik’s Cube—it’s easy to do one side, but what about all of the others?
