This is Jessica's story.  Actually, it's such a bizarre story that we should give it more of a snappy title...  How does 'Jessica's Taiwan Porn DVD Adventure' sound?  Jessica is a 27 year old Taiwanese, from the town of Hualien.  But she has worked in Taipei, the nation's capital city for nine years.  Over a cup of green tea she related details about an unusual job she'd recently tried out for...

As Jessica had studied Japanese at University and can now speak the language fluently, a Taiwanese friend told her about a job she may be interested in.  The friend wouldn't say exactly what the work entailed, but that it was in 'video editing and distribution'. She attended a city office building on a, more quiet than usual, sunny Sunday afternoon.  It was a long-weekend and Taipei had been deserted by many people who had returned to their country towns.

The business, on the seventh floor, had been surrounded by pasty, mucus coloured green partitions, certainly the first generation of this deplorable office furnishing from the 1970s. The communal and slightly cramped office had about 25 individual work spaces.  These were obviously separated into accounting, marketing and other management duties.  Then, towards one side of the room, there were five desks with basic video-editing equipment on them.

A man in his late 20's, quite matter of fact in his manner, approached Jessica and said calmly, 'this is a job that takes a special kind of girl'. The job?' - translating the rude words, which are then added as subtitles to porn DVDs!  You see, porn movies, all Japanese, are everywhere in Taiwan and just like their Japanese versions, they are heavily censored with the 'Mosaic from hell'.  This doesn't seem to inhibit thousands of Taiwanese men from buying them, with many men saying the mosaic makes no difference to their level of pleasure.

However, it does seem that Taiwanese men want to have all the 'small-talk' translated and subtitled into Chinese.  Despite selling thousands of movies, in Taiwan the cost per unit for such item, is actually quite low. This means that there is no way the local distributors would offer 'small-talk' translation, if there wasn't a real demand for it.  This small-talk, about 6-8 minutes of it, takes place at the beginning of almost all Japanese porn DVD's, before the real 'action' takes place.

Back now to Jessica: "My first thought was, great, I can get all these free porn movies for my brother, but what I actually said was, 'I don't know if my machine at home will be powerful enough.'" The man assured her that despite all the professional 'Panasonic' and 'Sony' laying around his workplace, the actual subtitling required very basic computer power and software.  The process is to create a .SRT sheet; this is actually a very small text file that is later merged with the raw (excuse the pun) video.  To complete each job, the translator just sends the text - of Japanese people making many naughty noises, translated into Chinese - to an email account, no need to upload any video.  Further, there wasn't any need for a young woman like Jessica to ever attend the grubby green offices of the distributor again, as all assigned work (the movies) can be downloaded from a private FTP site.  The process is all rather anonymous... 'Great, easy job,' thought Jessica.

The young 20-something man then looked at a schedule of movies waiting to be subtitled and handled Jessica a DVD. 'This is just a copy on a TDK disc, we are getting the artwork done for this one now and it will be released to Taiwan next week.'  Jessica went home, installed the subbing software on her PC and sat down to watch some porn. SUGOI! - GREAT!, OKII - BIG, CHIN-CHIN! - PENIS!, IKU! - GOING! (actually, Japanese don't say 'coming', they say 'going' - it's a concept like 'going to the toilet', so something like semen leaving the body, the same as in urine leaving the body).  But eventually, Jessica found that all the animal sounds that the most 'developed' animal (actually, Japanese men look more like monkeys when they are having sex - all gyration and no emotion) on Earth could not be accurately subtitled into Chinese.

It seems that Jessica was looking for perfection in an industry where such a goal is indeed, impossible.  She phoned the distributor saying she had come against some serious translation problems. 'Not a problem,' 20-something said, 'this is part of the job'.  All she needed to do was translate the 'small talk,' the rest, she could just make-up!  This he added, was especially the case during 'every films climax, as people often distance off microphone when other things [ejaculation] are happening' ... 'Just say anything you would expect a male to say when he's finishing,' he finally added.  Jessica said, 'Most people say all those porn stars are making it all up, but this adds an entirely new dimension!'

She got back to work and just as the male star was about to 'come/go' his voiced dropped off microphone (as she had been warned...). Immediately Jessica scripted (in Chinese) 'Oh, that was so good'.  Then she remembered what she had heard from her Japanese female friends - that Japanese men are, 'lousy in the bedroom and that their dicks are too small, even for most Japanese women!'  Immediately Jessica changed the sub to, 'Oh, that Viagra is so good'!  Soon after she replaced 'Oooh-Uhhh' sounds with 'Nya Nya Nya'...  Now this second one takes a bit of explaining...  In English, cats say 'meow' and similarly in Chinese, they say 'mow.'  But strangely (as any Chinese person knows), when a cat in Japan says its normal thing, locals hear 'Nya'!

After finishing a couple of movies, Jessica was not offered any more work with the distributor, not because of her pranks, but because she was too slow.  The job actually isn't high paying, most Taiwanese would say 'terrible money' - about the same as working at 7:11.  For this, Jessica didn't feel motivated to slave over her computer all day, working on animal sounds, when she only took the work on as a supplement to her normal income (doing boring work, importing green glue that makes all the electronic parts stick to PCB motherboards).

But now [maybe] we have some rather hilarious porn movies circulating in Taiwan that contain subtitled bestiality... This could become the latest Japanese fetish!