Are subtitles actually lost in translation?

jaykhunter

I was watching Red Dwarf with the subtitles on (because i was listening to the audio commentary) and I noticed that sometimes, the subtitles are an approximation of what's being said. For example :

actual line : "I wouldn't use this to buff my shoes!"
subtitled line : "I wouldn't use this on my shoes"

That got me thinking - Of all the foreign films I've seen; am I losing subtle nuances in the dialogue? I realise translating things; it might not be 100% accurate, but if there's a long speech, I might be losing words that flesh out a sentence.

I realise how pedantic this is :P but....so we're missing words when translated? Like would spanish-speakers appreciate El Orfanato (The Orphanage) more? And not just because we have to read subtitles?

amacachi

The thing I'd have most experience of would be anime and translation is hugely importantly. Believe it or not the illegally done stuff is generally far better than the official translations out later. Generally things like cultural references will be explained and some words will be left in the original Japanese and explained the first time which IMO is generally better than an attempt at a translation that has no proper equivalent.

krudler

I some cases, the original English translation dub of Akira is a mess, the subtitled version has completely different dialogue for a lot of the scenes and makes more sense.

Renn

I recently saw a French channel showing A Clockwork Orange with French subs...that made me laugh.

The King of Moo

I watch DVD's with subtitles on quite a bit as my girlfriend's fluent in English but not a native speaker and likes to keep them on in English in case she misses something. There are lots of little nuisances, from localisations to over-generalising to plain and simple mistakes.

Generalising is the worst for me, as sometimes they leave out a specific reference that's actually important for the story, or actually say something slightly different from the audio.

One thing I've noticed with foreign-language films is that the subtitles either use very very British English slang and references or very American ones. Apparently there are two completely different sets of subtitles on different DVD's of La Haine. It's annoying because the slang is often so specific or overused that it's distracting. In those cases it seems like the subtitler is a non-native speaker without much experience of real-world English who assumes people speak like that all the time, or they learned lots of phrases in their most recent English lesson on "colloquial language" . In fairness though, it can be hard to find equivalents for slang terms in different languages, so I'll cut them some slack.

One case that I found surprisingly annoying was Christine (the killer car film). For some reason the subtitler (from a Norwegian company) insisted on writing out full phrases whenever the characters used contractions. For example: "Don't do it! You shouldn't go in there! You're making a mistake!"
would become:
"Do not do it! You should not go in there! You are making a mistake!"
Every single time, which is a lot when you think about how often we use contractions! It was very annoying. Maybe (s)he thought it'd be easier on non-native speakers, but I know from experience that most learners are taught about contractions early on, and the meaning is usually pretty clear anyway.

Another little thing that bugged me a lot was just the other night. We were watching X-Men II, and the subtitles kept saying "bum" whenever Wolverine called someone "bub"! A little pedantic I know, but he is famous for saying "bub." There are so many cases like that of subtitlers mishearing simple, obvious things.

Going slightly off-topic, I've also become bewildered by the lack of consistency in the variety of subtitles available on DVD's. You'll get one famous film with the major European languages like German, French, Italian and Spanish. Then you'll get another with about twenty different languages and audio tracks. Then you'll get another with Finnish, Magyar and Arabic. There's no consistency at all, even within releases from the same studio, and you seem to find a lot with only two or three languages which seem to have been chosen randomly and aren't widely spoken. Maybe there's a good reason, but it seems strange.

im invisible

/OT
i used to work with a japanese girl back in 2003, one day we decided to go see that film 'lost in translation', i thought it was pretty good ... she didnt get it,
true story.

Miguel_Sanchez

The Norwegian subtitles on my copy of Ghostbusters are an approximation apparently.

Also wasn't there a big thing in the States when they got a really terrible translation on the subtitles for the DVD Let The Right One In and they forced the distributors to release a version with the proper subtitles.

johnny_ultimate

Yes, most foreign films are lost in translation to some degree. It's close to impossible to make a 100% loyal subtitle track. There are turns of phrase and things like puns that are very tricky to translate. The nearest thing to a 'solution' to this is previously mentioned anime fansubbing, that tend to have separate subtitles that pop up informing you why such and such a character said something that's actually a pun in Japanese, or what social norm someone's referencing. Only problem is that it can make a very top heavy amount of text on the screen, that's hard to keep up with. Some will translate every sign, piece of text, piece of incidental dialogue as well as the cultural eccentricities - the intentions are good, but you're left with one hell of a busy screen.

A basic example of untranslatable content would be the regular use in Japanese of the word 'Senpai': it denotes seniority - for example, in a school drama a junior student might use senpai to refer to an older student in the class. This isn't directly translatable (the best subs will just leave it in verbatim) and hence might be ignored by a subtitler.

Another well known example is in Battle Royale, in the scene in the lighthouse when the girls turn on each. This is apparently an even more effective scene for those with fluent Japanese and a thorough understanding of social and cultural norms. The scene starts of formal and polite, but the characters quickly resort to more coarse language and actions as the mood turns sour. Again, not much the translation company can do, and unless you're Japanese / fluent Japanese speaker, the carefully considered word play is going to be lost on you. You can add a load of obscenities, but it doesn't really have the same impact does it?

Of course, there's always just bad subtitling. Most might be familiar with the case of the Let the Right One In release in the US, where the company responsible for the home release actually offered fans a replacement because they'd ****ed up so royally with the home release. http://iconsoffright.com/news/2009/03/let_the_wrong_subtitles_in_to.html

But hey, they're all better than dubbing.

TheIrishGrover

Yeah, God I hate dubbing. It depends on the subtitling of course as others have said. I remember getting a bootleg (Didn't know it was bootleg at the time) of Spirited Away and I preferred it's subtitles over the official. For example, the medicine man was called Kamaji. In the official version they kept his name as Kamaji but in the bootleg they translated his name into English, Uncle Fire. It was a cool little insight into the wordplay. Plus, many fansubs do something similar. From translating signs to quick little explanations of various quirks (Although, I'm sure we've all seen those screenshots (real or not) where the fansubs go crazy)

Wasn't the Depardieu's version of Cyrano De Bergerac not a direct translation but all subtitled in rhyme?

bonerm

Jean-Pierre Jeunet said he reckons about 1/4 of the humour in Amelie was lost in translation.

ztoical

It depends totally on the company doing the translation and how much money the production company is willing to spend. It also depends on the market it's going to be aimed for. Alot of anime that is screened in the US is aimed at a younger audience then it would be in Japan [One Piece for example] so the translation tends to be simplied for young kids. Also when it comes to English subs companies tend to only pay for one set of English dubs which would cover all english countries, in order to make sure there isn't any confusion with regional slang and such they keep the subs pretty standard [the same tends to go for Spainish, French and Arabic, langauages that covers several countries and can have massive differences as spoken langauages from country to country]

There basicly two types of translation - literal translations where you translate the words directly without much consideration for the overly tone of the conversation while professional translators tend to translate the overall conversation in order to get across not just the meaning but the tone and feeling. This can take alot of time depending on how complex the piece is. When you've alot of play on words which is very common in French most translators just don't bother trying to translate it as it's not something that will translate very well while others will put some effort into trying to figure out a way to show the humor without having to have the whole screen filled with subtitles. Asterix is a great example of this as the characters names in French are meant to be really funny for how silly they are but direct translations don't work so the english translators spent a great deal of time coming up with a system for the english names that kept some of the humor by having the names be a comment on the character [Cacofonix the bard = cacophony]

There are some interesting issues with subtitling english films that use none english words like in the Terminator 2 when he says Hasta la vista, baby, when doing the spainish translation the joke/tone was lost so they had it read as Sayonara, baby.

Ridley

jaykhunter wrote: »

I was watching Red Dwarf with the subtitles on (because i was listening to the audio commentary) and I noticed that sometimes, the subtitles are an approximation of what's being said. For example :

actual line : "I wouldn't use this to buff my shoes!"
subtitled line : "I wouldn't use this on my shoes"

That got me thinking - Of all the foreign films I've seen; am I losing subtle nuances in the dialogue? I realise translating things; it might not be 100% accurate, but if there's a long speech, I might be losing words that flesh out a sentence.

I realise how pedantic this is :P but....so we're missing words when translated? Like would spanish-speakers appreciate El Orfanato (The Orphanage) more? And not just because we have to read subtitles?

http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/features/history/czech-the-difference/

Duffy the Vampire Slayer

I find dubbing to be okay on animation, but intolerable for live action.

The King of Moo

Duffy the Vampire Slayer wrote: »

I find dubbing to be okay on animation, but intolerable for live action.

I've always hated dubbing, but I never realised how common it is in the rest of Europe till I started working teaching kids English a few years ago. In most parts of the continent, everything in English is dubbed into the native language, including films and tv.
I still much prefer subtitles but the standard of dubbing in some places is so good that it's not so noticeable. For example, I've watched TV in Italy a few times, and most of the programmes and films are American imports, and the dubbing was pretty decent, very well synched, but ultimately there's always a sense of disconnect because you know that's not their real voice.
The voice actors are also very dedicated to their craft and those who dub famous actors generally do so for their whole careers.
Also, a fun fact. The same actor does the Italian voice for both Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It must have been interesting recording the café scene in Heat .

The Mad Hatter

The King of Moo wrote: »

I've always hated dubbing, but I never realised how common it is in the rest of Europe till I started working teaching kids English a few years ago. In most parts of the continent, everything in English is dubbed into the native language, including films and tv.
I still much prefer subtitles but the standard of dubbing in some places is so good that it's not so noticeable. For example, I've watched TV in Italy a few times, and most of the programmes and films are American imports, and the dubbing was pretty decent, very well synched, but ultimately there's always a sense of disconnect because you know that's not their real voice.
The voice actors are also very dedicated to their craft and those who dub famous actors generally do so for their whole careers.
Also, a fun fact. The same actor does the Italian voice for both Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It must have been interesting recording the café scene in Heat .

OT, but when I was doing a TEFL course a few years ago, one of the things our lecturer (who'd lived in Spain and Portugal) told us was that Spanish dubs are always great, because the companies were rich enough to fund expensive dubbing technology, but Portugal, being poorer, always used subtitles. He said that an off-shoot of this was that Portuguese people almost invariably had much better pronunciation of English than Spanish, because they were so much more used to hearing the language.

jester77

I find it very distracting at times. Sometimes I will have German subtitles on for German movies and it's very different to what they are saying. However, sometimes it's hard to avoid taking these shortcuts and rough translations. There are often scenes where it would be impossible to keep with the speed of what is being said and if you were to subtitle everything it wouldn't allow you to watch the scene properly.

pickarooney

I simply can't watch anything that's dubbed. I wouldn't go to a Jens Lekman concert to hear Justin Bieber singing and I wouldn't go to an art gallery to look at a painting that had been scribbled all over by some ham-fist with a box of crayons.

The quality of subtitling depends hugely on the source material. Some languages are fundamentally less nuanced and lend themselves better to internationalisation and the register of the dialogue counts for an awful lot. Legal/Medical dramas are normally easier to translate with their codified jargon but humour of any sort is a real minefield.

rain on

The subtitles completely ruined Girl With A Dragon Tattoo for me - they were barely even grammatical sometimes and when they were, they were so clumsily expressed that it was really distracting. I've been wary of subtitles ever since. Recently, Cargo and Julia's Eyes were a bit dodgy too but I've never seen anything as bad as the Girl With A Dragon Tattoo ones.

The King of Moo

The Mad Hatter wrote: »

OT, but when I was doing a TEFL course a few years ago, one of the things our lecturer (who'd lived in Spain and Portugal) told us was that Spanish dubs are always great, because the companies were rich enough to fund expensive dubbing technology, but Portugal, being poorer, always used subtitles. He said that an off-shoot of this was that Portuguese people almost invariably had much better pronunciation of English than Spanish, because they were so much more used to hearing the language.

I can imagine that, good subtitles are a great way to help learn a language, and I'd always recommend students watch films in their own tongue with English subtitles on or vice versa when they asked for ways to keep learning English at home, but often they couldn't get good subtitles, if any.
Sky in Italy actually have a great service where you can choose to have things in the original English or dubbed in Italian, and offer good English or Italian subtitles. They'd also have popular programmes shown the day after they were shown in the States in English, and then a few days later dubbed into Italian.
It's a shame that in general the same effort often doesn't seem to go into providing English subtitles for foreign films.

Renn

pickarooney wrote: »

I simply can't watch anything that's dubbed. I wouldn't go to a Jens Lekman concert to hear Justin Bieber singing and I wouldn't go to an art gallery to look at a painting that had been scribbled all over by some ham-fist with a box of crayons.

The quality of subtitling depends hugely on the source material. Some languages are fundamentally less nuanced and lend themselves better to internationalisation and the register of the dialogue counts for an awful lot. Legal/Medical dramas are normally easier to translate with their codified jargon but humour of any sort is a real minefield.

Would you watch Red Desert?