Is All Subtitling This Bad?

By -
I'm watching Il Commissario Montalbano on DVD. I can now understand enough spoken Italian that I can often compare what is being said with the subtitles. All the time, the subtitler is doing things like translating "She was 15 or 16" to "She was 15."

It's not like this is ambiguous, or the English is just a different wording, or something. The medical examiner said the corpse had been 15 or 16 when she died. The subtitle is just wrong: if you gave this translation in Italian class, you would get half credit.

How can that happen?

Comments

  1. Ken B3:42 PM

    I think there is a concern to keep subtiles short. Not everyone reads quickly, and even if you do you wanna watch the pictures. I have certainly noticed this sort of thing on a few Germen movies subtitled in English when I strain to listen to the dialogue (just a bit beyond my capability most of the time.)

    In German I expect they leave Hamlet's question at "Sein oder nicht?" for similar reasons.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Blogging about Flogging10:06 PM

    I am a German native and I have never read (or heard) Hamlets question beeing translated to "Sein oder nicht?". It's always "Sein oder Nichtsein". :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous11:07 PM

    I watched Farewell The other night. Russian, French and English, with english subtitles. One russian spy says to the other "au revoir"
    subtitle "adeiu". There were a few plays on the words 'goodbye' and 'farewell' in the script itself. I would guess that this is a continuation of that theme.

    Pretty good movie.

    ReplyDelete
  4. master_of_americans12:22 AM

    If you're lucky when shopping for DVDs in China, you can get bootlegs of American movies with English subtitles that are a pretty solid translation of the Chinese subtitles ... they bear only the loosest relationship to the actual English words being spoken on the screen naturally. I have no idea why they would put so much more effort in translating the ridiculous Chinese into English than in translating the original into Chinese, but I have witnessed this phenomenon myself several times during my stay in China.

    ReplyDelete
  5. master_of_americans12:22 AM

    If you're lucky when shopping for DVDs in China, you can get bootlegs of American movies with English subtitles that are a pretty solid translation of the Chinese subtitles ... they bear only the loosest relationship to the actual English words being spoken on the screen naturally. I have no idea why they would put so much more effort in translating the ridiculous Chinese into English than in translating the original into Chinese, but I have witnessed this phenomenon myself several times during my stay in China.

    ReplyDelete
  6. mike@hod.net12:04 AM

    I often watch DVDs with the french subtitles turned on to practice all that french I had to take in high school. Yes, they're often that bad.

    Mike

    French closed captioning for this post: "Oui"

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more