Since its launch in 2013, the Taiwan Film Institute’s Taiwan Cinema Digital Restoration Project has restored two to three classic Taiwanese films every year. The restoration of Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) subtitles on Hoklo-language movies is not only significant for cultural preservation, but also serves to promote the use of the language.
Last year, the institute collaborated with National Taiwan Normal University’s Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature to create the world’s first Hoklo subtitles, for the Hoklo movie Back to Anping Harbor released in 1972, starring Taiwanese opera superstar Yang Li-hua (楊麗花).
The National Education Radio has prepared a brilliant report on the movie for its Hoklo-learning program’s episode on Hoklo movies.
Screening vintage Hoklo drama movies in the 21st century serves a specific audience. To attract new moviegoers, more effort needs to be made to teach the language to the younger generation by having them watch Hoklo movies.
I was lucky enough to be invited to the screening of Back to Anping Harbor at the Taiwan Association of University Professors in Taipei on Wednesday last week. After the screening, a survey of the audience’s opinion about the efficacy of the Hoklo subtitles was conducted.
However, the audience could hardly make up a proper sample for the survey, as it was mainly composed of a niche group, so its representative significance is questionable.
To study the Hoklo subtitles’ effectiveness, more public participation and attention from people with insight and knowledge on the matter are needed.
Hoklo and Mandarin are derived from the writing system of Chinese characters, but there are differences. The movie title serves as a good example: It would be written as 回來安平港 in Mandarin, but 轉來安平港 in Hoklo.
Past government policies have led to a decline in the number of people who understand, speak and read Hoklo.
Hoklo movies with Hoklo subtitles would definitely be more authentic than those with a Mandarin counterpart. However, if the audience is not familiar with the Hoklo pronunciation, reading Hoklo subtitles to assist their understanding of the movie would only pose more challenges, as scenes change rapidly, while people reading text in a book or magazine can pause or slow down whenever they need to and digest the meaning of the text at their own pace.
The Contents of the Times (文藝春秋), winner of the literature category in this year’s Golden Tripod Awards for publication, and Shih Bai-jiun’s (施達樂) Lang Hua (浪花), the first Taiwanese winner of the Wuxia Novel Contest, along with Shih’s previous Taiwanese martial arts novel Ben Se (本色), all fully deploy the wittiness of writing Hoklo in Mandarin. Reading out sentences from these books will bring enormous fun and a deeper understanding of the content to readers who are familiar with Hoklo.
Hoklo education should first aim to teach children how to understand and speak the language before teaching them to read and write, which are more challenging. As elementary schools only teach Hoklo one hour per week, progress for children from families who do not value the language would be even slower.
A policy to implement bilingual education in Mandarin and English is around the corner, which would certainly squeeze the space and time for Hoklo learning. If people leave the tasks of teaching Hoklo reading and writing skills to texts and try to cultivate young people’s listening and speaking skills by watching Hoklo movies, it would contribute more to learning the language than one could hope for.
Lin Jung-shu is a retired teacher.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs