Name: How Shōgun Makes Translation Exciting
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T17:14:11.000Z
Duration: 8 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When Paramount and NBC adapted James Clavell's best selling novel shogun into a TV miniseries in 1980, the writer Eric Bercovici reframed the source material in a significant way.

And I told James Clavell my idea, which was to take his story, turn it inside out and tell the whole tale of Shogun from Blackthorn's point of view, where we understand what he understands, where we see what he sees, and

whenever he is confused, we are equally confused.

To accomplish this, the show chose not to subtitle Japanese dialogue, so American audiences would be as lost as protagonist John Blackthorne, a ship pilot who's based on the first Englishman to reach Japan in the year 1600.

For this version of the story, the subtitle choice is dramatically effective.

We are fully anchored in Blackthorn's perspective.

Learning as he learns, feeling as he feels.

Of course, what you lose by this framing is the interiority of all the characters who speak only Japanese.

And for an epic set in Japan about an important period in Japanese history, the loss is a big one.

Clavell's novel definitely has that stranger in a strange land element.

Blackthorn is still the protagonist, after all, but

it also lets us into the minds and conversations of the Japanese characters, which is what FX's stellar 2024 remake of the Shogun miniseries does as well as.

Instead of just one focal character, Shogun 2024 has multiple, most of which are Japanese, and

This choice does make the viewer less confused than Blackthorn, but

it doesn't downplay the sense of east meets west culture shock.

What's made this new series so compelling to me is how it uses the act of translation to explore the possibilities and limitations of communication across cultures and communication periods.

How do I say I understand in your language?

When Blackthorn arrives in Japan, his first translator is a Japanese Catholic who knows very little Portuguese, which is spoken as English on this show.

And it's significant here at the beginning that Blackthorn asks how to say I understand.

Shogun is very interested, as we'll see, in the difference or the gap between simple translation and understanding.

His second translator is a Portuguese Catholic priest who speaks broken Japanese.

Once he finds out that Blackthorn is an English Protestant, he refuses to translate honestly.

Instead of communicating Blackthorn's words, the priest communicates the meaning of Blackthorn's presence to him.

Unable to speak for himself, Blackthorn closes the language gap with a gesture.

Blackthorn's first proper translator is another Catholic priest who honestly relays his words to Lord Toranaga.

In order to ensure this honesty, Toranaga invites another translator, Lady Mariko, who also knows Japanese and Portuguese.

The show communicates the faithfulness of this translation to us by gradually removing the translators until Toranaga seems seems to be directly speaking to Blackthorne.

And here's the advantage to using Shogun 2024 is able to show a true meeting of the minds between two focal characters who speak different languages.

My lord would like to say that he is sorry for the time he spent in prison.

Later in the same episode, Lady Mariko becomes Blackthorn's primary translator.

And what's interesting is how she subtly alters the conversation.

I hope your time in prison wasn't too difficult doesn't necessarily suggest an apology.

And I'm grateful to be alive doesn't necessarily suggest thanks.

Mariko adds these sentiments, quietly controlling the tone of the exchange.

Till this milk dribbling fucks me, I'm ready to go.

This is a role Mariko continues to play most dramatically in episode five.

During a dinner scene with her husband, Bull Blackthorn, and

Blackthorn's consort Fuji, Madiko attempts to smooth out the aggression between the two men by changing their language.

My husband comments on the way you eat your noodles.

The sound you make while eating reveals the depth of your pleasure.

If you look at the 1980 version of the scene, Mariko still translates, but

we're blocked from Buntaro and Fuji's words, so we have to take her translation at face value.

In the 2024 version with subtitles, we get a riveting scene of dramatic irony where the translation translation itself becomes significant, a mediation between the interplay of four minds.

In trying to avoid conflict, Mariko is faced with translating cultural values as well as language, and

When Blackthorne asks Buntaro for war stories, he's communicating a positive English value for boasting that Buntaro considers vulgar and rude.

Those three words carry far more meaning than their basic definitions.

And this isn't the episode's only mistranslation of three words.

When Blackthorn receives a pheasant from Toranaga, he hangs it outside his house to mature and tells his household off the cuff.

Sawa ta d. Eventually, the pheasant rots.

Its stench disturbs the peace of the neighborhood, and

the kindly old gardener finally takes it down at the cost of his life.

What have you done Depending on the context, the same words can carry wildly different meanings.

You put that old man to death over a stinking God cursed pheasant.

To translate the correct meaning requires a deep thought.

Familiarity with the two languages and the cultures that created them go away.

You know, I don't believe that true translation is impossible.

I don't believe communication between cultures is impossible.

And I don't think Shogun believes that either.

But translation means more than a relaying of words, and the show wants us to think about that.

After all, Blackthorne isn't the only English speaker being translated to here.

Shogun's Japanese dialogue was actually written in English, carefully translated, translated into Japanese, into period specific phrasing, then carefully translated back into English to be consumed by us in the form of subtitles.

The showrunners spent a lot of time and resources on this, clearly.

But I can't help but wonder about the subtleties that I'm missing.

The fact that I'm even thinking about that means the show is doing its job.

You know, translation is usually something that creators of film and TV try to avoid at all costs.

It takes up a lot of precious time with unnecessary repetition.

Shogun 2024 has found a way to make translation a central theme of the show.

And the act of translation into gripping television.

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