Random Factoid 2 : Apichatpong

Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Meet the YouTube Play Jury (20 Oct 2010)

"Hello, I'm Apichatpong Weerasethakul"

Yes, you heard it. He didn't introduce himself as "Joe" to the YouTube-Guggenheim audience, so don't be a smartass. In print especially, you don't need to be overly familiar and substitute his real name by a westernized nickname. This is so condescending for non-English artists, and so infantilizing for the English readers who might be afraid of such a long name. Remnants of colonialism that a country like Thailand doesn't need right now. Make foreigners use your own language to "fit in" or else the western audience shall not make the effort to remember you... (see Bourdieu's cultural capital). I don't care if Apichatpong himself, humbly invites his English interviewers to call him "joe" (probably because the mispronounciation is exasperating), it should be a mark of respect to decline and MAKE AN EFFORT. He's a Palme d'Or winner now. In written form you, nor your readers, do not have to pronounce it, so there is really no reason to use a demeaning shorthand in an article. If YouTube users can make the effort, we could expect the film criticism literates to be able to do as much! Arnold Schwarzenegger  kept his full name for his bodybuilding career, his movie career and his political career without any colonialist censorship... so learn how to copy/paste (CTRL+CV for the lazy ones) a name hard to spell if your memory is that bad.
"Foreign films" already are subtitled in approximate translation, and their titles is translated and westernized, to provide a vulgarized version for an audience who doesn't speak the film's native language... but why should a family name be truncated out of laziness? Respect world cultures and try to meet half-way the works of art that are not part of your usual culture.

The ultimate remake, not only remaking (rebranding) foreign culture (foreign scripts) to appropriate creative talents that aren't theirs, Western countries would like to re-name foreign artists, to christen them so that sounds less otherworldly and more familiar, integrated, digested, assimilated in a world that knows no Others.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOOK COVER ANYWHERE???

HAVE YOU SEEN THESE FILM POSTERS ANYWHERE???

NO? THEN STFU ALREADY!

Related:

• Critical Fallacy 8: Prejudice