I Don't Even Speak Cantonese!
May 28, 2013
I did something very stupid recently and feel the need to share it with you. I recently started playing Sleeping Dogs, a third-person action game in the style of Grand Theft Auto IV from Square-Enix and United Front Games. When I started the game for the first time, I was prompted to set the game's options before anything else: brightness, screen dimensions, volume, etc. The final option was to enable subtitles with my choices being OFF, ON, and CANTONESE. Now, when it comes to games like these, I like to leave the subtitles turned off and let the characters speak for themselves. I want to listen to the voices and watch the action unfold like a movie, so I turned the subtitles off and confirmed my choices. I did find it admirable that the game offered a setting for Cantonese subtitles, but since I don't speak Cantonese, there's no way I'd ever need that option.
The game began right away after that. The story is set in Hong Kong and, as one might expect, features largely Chinese characters. In the opening scene, a pair of security officers watch events on a surveillance camera feed. They speak to each other in Cantonese... and I have no idea what they're saying. That's when it hits me — that subtitle option for Cantonese wasn't for subtitles in Cantonese, it was for subtitles for Cantonese presented in English. I went back into the options menu and turned the proper subtitle setting on and now I can read what the characters say when they speak their native language, but I really hope that nothing important was said in those first few moments of the game because I completely missed it. After all, I don't speak Cantonese (or understand game option menus, apparently).