PARASITE (2019): Sharon Choi, The Filmmaking Team’s Translator, Pens Awards Season Essay

The translator Sharon Choi opens up about the film’s awards campaign

Sharon Choi could be seen all over the media as the English-speaking face of the Parasite (2019). However, she could only be heard through the translated words of her Korean contemporaries. In an exclusive essay penned for Variety, Choi divulged on her own whirlwind experience of the past ten months.

Choi is cognizant of her position as a student filmmaker and is humble in her burgeoning abilities as an artist. Despite her film-school struggles, she admits to feeling most at home on the sets of her fellow classmates.

Nevertheless, her translator application (a late one, at that) made its way into the hands of the Parasite team. Next thing Choi knew, she was plucked out of her studies and on her way to the Cannes premiere. The groundbreaking and acclaim-filled months that followed is…well, history!

A global reach

Choi admits that translating for a worldwide audience was a nerve-wracking task. The job didn’t offer her much time to enjoy the spotlight, as she said there was “no time to reminisce”. What’s more, she feared that she might make a massive faux pas and misinterpret Bong Joon-Ho or anyone else on the Parasite team. Thankfully, other industry veterans helped her put things into perspective, which set her mind a little more at ease.

Choi elaborates:

My job was made easy by [Bong’s] consideration, and it helped that I was already familiar with his language as a filmmaker and a thinker, having written college papers about him. Yet I was constantly battling impostor syndrome, and an anxiety that I might misrepresent the words of someone so beloved in front of people I’d grown up admiring. The only cures for stage fright were ten-second meditations backstage, and knowing that I was not who they were seeing. There is no medium I love more than cinema, but I constantly had to tell myself something I overheard a French publicist shout to her stressed peers: “It’s just cinema!”

Choi’s respect for Bong grew as the promotional tour went on. From photo shoots to interviews to press junkets, she admired the detailed observation he brought to every facet of it.

If anything, it reinforced her belief in Parasite’s ability to surpass both language and cultural barriers. She describes the film as having a sense of “flexibility”, which can garner empathy in its viewers regardless of background. It also reminded her of why she fell in love with cinema in the first place:

All my life I’ve been frustrated by having to choose one of the two [languages, Korean or English]. This is why I fell in love with cinema’s visual language. Filmmaking is a similar process of translating my interior into a language that can communicate with the outside world, but I didn’t have to search for equivalents that were only approximations of the original.

Stories to be told

Choi concludes her piece with a sense of bittersweet elation. While she’s sad that Parasite’s award run is over, she’s hopeful of the experiences the future holds.

She denies the post-Oscars rumor that she’s working on a film based on awards season itself. (Awards circuit reporters love to self-aggrandize, no?) However, Choi does confirms that she is working on a film of her own. In keeping in line with Bong quoting Martin Scorsese, she says it’s “deeply personal” because “the personal is the most creative”.

“I can’t wait for my minutes to end so that next time my name pops up with a spam ad, it’s with my own story. It’ll just be me and my laptop for a while, and the only translating job I have now is between myself and the language of cinema.”

Parasite won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last May in a unanimous jury vote. It also won 4 Oscars at the 92^nd Academy Awards last week, including Best Picture and Best Director for Bong. It is currently available for purchase on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital, and is still playing in select theatres nationwide.

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