ABSTRACT
Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is in Tokyo to shoot an advertizing commercial for a well-known brand of Japanese whiskey. On the phone back to his wife in Los Angeles, he tells her about places he has been going to and the people he has been meeting. She offers the comment, ‘I’m glad you’re having fun’ and his self-defensive reply is, ‘It’s not fun. It’s just very, very different.’ Harris’s rejoinder in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) sums up what the main characters find most perplexing about this new environment in which they find themselves, namely, that it is, ‘very, very different.’ In this chapter, we will examine a number of films which consider what happens when translation becomes a way of examining the contemporary consequences of living in a globalized world. The films, Lost in Translation, The Interpreter (2005) and Babel (2006) are all major productions featuring well-known cinema actors, appearing within a relatively short time of each other and all involving explicit references to the problem of translation.
