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Like most of the world, I recently watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
The scene where Ayo recites the Winter Soldier’s activation phrase and Bucky finally realizes that he can no longer be controlled through Hydra’s programming of his subconscious mind is one of the most powerful pieces of writing and acting that I have seen in a very long time. I was rewatching it earlier and I had to pause and just sit with the emotions for a moment because it was such a phenomenal payoff to the arc that the character has been on.
Something jumped out at me, though, about the words themselves.
Not in the “what Marvel Easter eggs can I find?” way, but in the “how was this translated and why?” and “what are some deeper implications of what these words evoke as related to this specific character?” ways.
I have some observations that some of you – especially the fanfic writers – are really going to want to know about for their intriguing storytelling potential, including a massive continuity error that I discovered in Captain America: Civil War while cross-referencing for this piece.
Full disclosure/disclaimer before we continue: I am not a native Russian speaker. I am a native English speaker who studied some Russian in university as part of my linguistics degree, and who is passionate about both languages and storytelling. I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years continuing to learn, but I am by no means fluent and there are definitely plenty of aspects of the language that I don’t know, don’t understand, or don’t have a good feel for. To cover my bases since I don’t currently know any native Russian speakers to consult on this, I have cross-referenced my personal feelings about these words with several reference texts in my personal library, including:
- Leveraging Your Russian with Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes by Gary Browning, David K Hart, and Raisa Solovyova
- Russian Etymological Dictionary by Terence Wade
- A Frequency Dictionary of Russian by Serge Sharoff, Elena Umanskaya, and James Wilson
- Collins Russian Concise Dictionary
I would also like to invite any native Russian speakers to comment on this series, and to let me know if they have thoughts that differ.
In any event, even if I do get some of the specific Russian details incorrect, my point throughout this series – and probably this entire blog – is simple: words mean things.
I know; I know – that’s obvious. Right?
Except one of the biggest things that I’ve noticed throughout my life, both personally and in my professional experience first as a translation project manager and then as a technical writer, is that most of us don’t think very carefully about the full set of baggage that any given word carries when we’re choosing which ones to use. Sure, when we’re writing misdirection or innuendo, we’re all about finding the exact right way to put things, but the rest of the time? Not so much. The result is that our writing – our communication in general – is far less effective and impactful than it could be.
So what does this have to do with the Winter Soldier activation phrase?
I’m so glad you asked.
Firstly, it’s a well-known example of translation in media. The ambiguity of its usage (since it’s supposed to be a random phrase) is part of what makes it interesting – I know I’ve seen many people make connections between the words and plot points or character elements (such as here) for almost as long as we’ve had this list – but ambiguity is the enemy of good translation. Someone had to choose which meanings to emphasize and which to minimize or dispense with entirely, and examining the implications of those choices can still lead to some great takeaway lessons for writing which doesn’t involve any translated or bilingual elements. It makes for a really nice, encapsulated laboratory to look at the effect of connotations and why it’s so important to choose our words carefully.
Secondly, according to an interview with the writers (quoted here), the words themselves were chosen to be enigmatic – evocative but not necessarily significant – something that leaves them open to a much wider range of interpretations that can potentially be used to enhance narratives involving (and analyses of) the character of Sergeant James Bucky Barnes.
Thirdly, it’s short. With only 10 words, we can talk about each one in depth and not take all year to do it.
Finally, this is the internet, where fandom reigns. Let’s just have fun with it.
I have decided to divide this up into multiple posts. As mentioned above, there are 10 words in the phrase: longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak, furnace, nine, benign, homecoming, one, freight car.
I’ve broken them up so that they fall into three categories:
- Effectively Interchangeable Words: that is, words which don’t experience any significant changes to their meaning when translated from English to Russian and vice versa. On this list, that’s pretty much just the numbers (seventeen, nine, and one), so in this section I will also explain why easy, direct translatability is super rare, call out some pitfalls that you’re likely to experience when dealing with a language that you (as the writer) don’t speak, and give some tips for avoiding those pitfalls as much as humanly possible.
- Acceptable Variations for Pragmatic Reasons: that is, words where the writer or translator made a distinctive choice that cannot be completely mirrored in the other language, but which doesn’t create or destroy any narrative potentials that depart significantly from what the other language has. In this section, we’ll look at rusted, daybreak, furnace, and freight car.
- We Need to Talk About This: that is, words where the differences between the two terms offer very different metaphorical and emotional implications, to the point where I think a different word probably would have better captured the meaning in one or the other of the languages. Each of them is a unique case, so they will be treated in separate posts. They are: longing, benign, and homecoming.