Translation with a time limit
August 5, 2008 5:00 PM   Subscribe

Adventures in European subtitling. "With films like these I often feel like I am some sort of firefighter trying to salvage as much as I can from an immense burning mansion. You take out the expensive furniture and artwork and all the people and you leave behind the wallpaper, the rugs, the goldfish tank and the occasional poodle. Sorry, folks, no time." via
posted by Knappster (77 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
Interesting stuff, and for those of you who are thinking "Boring": he talks a lot about porn!
posted by languagehat at 5:23 PM on August 5, 2008


A pro translator friend of mine once passed a good chunk of an evening figuring out exactly which Cthulhu Mythos tomes the Japanese author in question was referencing. (If you ever need to do this in your professional career, there's a website, as it turns out.)

"Secret of the Monster Maggot" just doesn't have the same gravitas as De Vermis Mysteriis...
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 5:39 PM on August 5, 2008


A fascinating article on what is probably a dry subject for all but nerds like me and languagehat. This is why I read metafilter, and I thank you very much, Knappster.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 5:57 PM on August 5, 2008


A tad unrelated, but this post reminded me of Disney's practice of re-dubbing all their films for most of the major languages -- songs included. And they rhyme surprisingly often, too.

For example, from Aladdin:

"Prince Ali" - French
"Grande Ali" - Italian
"Prinz Ali" - German
"Gran Ali" - European Spanish
"Príncipe Ali" - Latin American Spanish
"Prince Ari"* - Japanese

And if you call now, you can get the Linguo-tastic SuperMix, consisting of Polish, Korean, English, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Bulgarian, Icelandic, Hebrew, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Swedish, and Hungarian!

YouTube's great for this -- if you want more, plug in just about any Disnery song and a language and it's bound to be there.

* I calls 'em like I hears 'em.
posted by Rhaomi at 6:03 PM on August 5, 2008 [5 favorites]


It must indeed be weird to hear Will Smith speak French or German all of a sudden...

Wöll Smöth?

Nice article, thanks!
posted by turgid dahlia at 6:08 PM on August 5, 2008


As an adjunct, you haven't really lived until you've watched a pirated DVD that has been translated from spoken English into dubbed Chinese, then given Bengali subtitles, then had those subtitles translated back into English. My brother returned from Bangladesh a while ago and brought back dozens of these things because they could be had for pennies and, whoa, boy, I don't know what to tell you.
posted by turgid dahlia at 6:18 PM on August 5, 2008


That was a great read. There number of invisible but obvious-once-you-see-them obstacles involved in different sorts of translation projects leaves me feeling a tremendous amount of respect for the folks who do this stuff and do it well (and a lot more understanding of some of the weird hedges that seem to come up in otherwise decent translations).

I read a nice little article a while back on the difficulties of translating from Japanese to English in a video game context; some of the same things La Roche invokes, esp. limited text space and the translation of culturally-steeped mythological figures, applies here too in spades.
posted by cortex at 6:19 PM on August 5, 2008


And if you call now, you can get the Linguo-tastic SuperMix

That is awesome. It'd be more awesome if the levels weren't all over the place (I presume it was itself cribbed from sundry varying-quality rips on Youtube/torrents), but just the concept is pretty damned great.
posted by cortex at 6:21 PM on August 5, 2008


What turgid dahlia said, with the addition that different culture's ideal masculine and feminine voices, when dubbed over a story you know well, can lead to some very surreal moments.
posted by lekvar at 6:21 PM on August 5, 2008


Where's MeFi's own subtitling and captioning curmudgeon (but not former Prime Minister) Joe Clark? Let's get the subtitling anecdotes rolling here!
posted by GuyZero at 6:22 PM on August 5, 2008


Great article. Sounds like a difficult job. I especially liked learning the rule of thumb that subtitling is best when you forget that it is there.
I get totally thrown off when, on screen, someone speaks for about 60 seconds, and it is translated into three or four words ("I love you, too").
Moving my eyes from the action to the bottom of the screen and back, to make sure that no new dialog has been translated, drives me nuts.
posted by Shebear at 6:41 PM on August 5, 2008


Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?
Ja! ... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!

Subtitle THAT.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 6:51 PM on August 5, 2008 [1 favorite]


I (and at least one other Mefite, who I won't call out lest I embarrass him) have had the pleasure of subtitling the Japanese program shown in the USA under the title Ultimate Banzuke.

We got paid decent rates for this, and were able to work on a pretty easy schedule. It was the first subtitling job I'd ever done, and while I was familiar with the general principles of subtitling Guy discusses in the linked article, I'd never had to put them into practice.

Keeping things short was a huge problem. The announcers on the program spoke very fast by any measure; we were given a transcript broken down by time codes, and had to translate each code. If you watch the show and see subtitles flipping by a little too quickly, that's why.

Much like Guy describes trying to find the title of a Spanish book mentioned in an American porn video, I found myself trying to decrypt a phrase (that was used more than once, so I didn't feel like I could let it slide) that turned out to refer to a system of statistics-based coaching in baseball. I spent about half an hour reading up on it on Japanese Wikipedia—and then, of course, I couldn't translate that phrase, because it's meaningless outside Japan. I had to think of some way of representing the point the speaker was trying to get across at a more abstract level. In another instance, they had on a bike triallist whose nickname was the nickname used by an 11th-century military figure. Figuring out where the name came from wasn't hard. Figuring out why he might have that nickname was a little harder. Figuring out what to substitute that would be meaningful to an American audience took some cogitating.

Later I worked on an episode that was shot in the USA—at Knott's Berry Farm, which I imagined exemplified for the Japanese audience every negative stereotype they might hold of Americans. This was extra-fun, because we had English-speakers being subtitled in Japanese, and Japanese speakers being subtitled in Japanese. The project lead had also made certain decisions about how certain roles would be referred to in English that were directly contradicted by the English-speakers on that episode. I never found out how they reconciled that.

The most consistently interesting translation challenge was that people said things that their American counterparts would never say, or in ways that they'd never say them. Self-effacing Japanese skater dudes. Competitors apologizing to their friends for not doing better. An announcer who said of a competitor's futile struggles in one contest "It's like a metaphor for modern existence!" I just can't hear John Madden saying that.
posted by adamrice at 7:03 PM on August 5, 2008 [12 favorites]


Here's a great video on the problems of the anime fansubbing scene, The Rise and Fall of Anime Fansubs (torrent, YouTube)

I learnt a lot about both fasubbing and professional subtitiling from it.

Re: pirated subtitles - I saw Ong-Bak with English subtitles that were clearly the result of machine translation, with definitions or clarifications of words in the text. It was complete gibberish.
posted by magnusbe at 7:11 PM on August 5, 2008 [3 favorites]


Argh. Fansubbing and subtitling.
posted by magnusbe at 7:12 PM on August 5, 2008


Where's MeFi's own subtitling and captioning curmudgeon (but not former Prime Minister) Joe Clark?

He is on the scene.
posted by Knappster at 7:19 PM on August 5, 2008


I get a big kick out of watching Disney dubs, because they're so well done. I especially love "Hakuna Matata" in French, which keeps the same tune, rhymes well, and makes sense. The mouth movements even pretty much match up. I normally prefer subtitles, but quality dubs are a lovely thing. I'd love a Swahili version of it, to see how it would get around all of the lyrics explaining what "Hakuna Matata" means.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 7:28 PM on August 5, 2008


adamrice: You're (partly) responsible for hours and hours of hugely entertaining wasted time. I've always been amused by the subs. I wish they'd show more Banzuke and less Ninja Warrior, but that's a discussion best left to the dorm room.

All those dubbed Disney songs, for some reason, brought this to mind: Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" in Mandarin. It sounds like the female equivalent of Microsoft Sam on speed--I wonder how many computers/autotuners/whatevers were used to make that sound even remotely right. (To transform the voice of a Mandarin speaker into robotic-sounding Avril? or to make Avril's Mandarin sound remotely correct?)
posted by thack3r at 7:47 PM on August 5, 2008


While visiting Budapest in 1991 I went to see a French film. I can sort of understand French and I figured I could watch and ignore the Hungarian subtitles. Unfortunately, instead of titles, there was a live simultaneous translation by a man talking over a loudspeaker in the theater. He had an emotionless monotone voice and was doing all the parts, male and female. It was utterly bizarre. Since I couldn't hear any of the real dialogue, I got up and left after a few minutes.
posted by gubo at 8:07 PM on August 5, 2008


Joe Who?
posted by five fresh fish at 9:10 PM on August 5, 2008 [1 favorite]


He had an emotionless monotone voice and was doing all the parts, male and female.

I wonder how many of these people are left? Seems a vestigial practice at best from the days before recorded and synchronised soundtracks (and still common in Japan until the late 1940s, I believe).

Very interesting!
posted by Wolof at 9:15 PM on August 5, 2008


I used to subtitle Norwegian versions of films and TV shows (mainly from English). It was so poorly paid you basically had to write the subtitles in real time.
posted by Dumsnill at 9:19 PM on August 5, 2008


So, purist motives aside, it seems like a good dub is actually more accurate/truer to the original than good subtitles?
posted by maxwelton at 9:44 PM on August 5, 2008


I love the "raining cats and dogs" example.
posted by Arturus at 9:49 PM on August 5, 2008


it seems like a good dub is actually more accurate/truer to the original than good subtitles?

If you're referring to the semantic content of the original work, definitely, as the rate of speech can be more or less accurately reproduced, meaning less pruning is necessary. If you think of film as an audiovisual construction whose primary illusion is one of unity, however, the split between the actor's mouth and the sound that comes out of it is the greater irritant. The perceptual apparatus is pretty finely focused around areas of speech and its reception — for instance, most people can easily detect a difference of one frame per second between the sound and the image tracks when an actor speaks or sings a song and the mouth is visible. Compare this, for example, with the amount of leeway granted by many to an actor affecting to play an instrument, and you'll get a sense of the stakes involved and how they are weighted.
posted by Wolof at 10:01 PM on August 5, 2008 [2 favorites]


I should probably add that I may seem in some sense above to be refashioning a cultural phenomenon as a natural one, and doubtless thus represent the pallid shrieking head of bourgeois normativism attempting to claim the universality of my own prejudices. I am aware, for example, that Italian cinema tolerates a much freer relationship between the speaker's image and their heard words than is usual in the English-speaking world, and that this is entirely a fact of culture. My observation hinges, rather, on the centrality of synchronism itself to the cinematic experience, and how and where that synchronism is more tightly or more loosely experienced.
posted by Wolof at 10:21 PM on August 5, 2008 [1 favorite]


The statement to the effect that everybody reads the subtitles wether they want to or not rings true. I usually turn off the subtitles on English language DVDs, otherwise I'm constantly second-guessing the subtitler, and it slightly ruins the movie for me.
posted by Harald74 at 10:36 PM on August 5, 2008 [1 favorite]


I've seen quite a bit of Latvian TV, where they use voiceovers, and it's pure TV hell. The worst is where they use a single guy to do all the dialogue, and that guy is bored silly. Slightly better is were they use one man and one woman to read the male and female parts, respectively.
posted by Harald74 at 10:37 PM on August 5, 2008


adamrice - me and the family love Ultimate Banzuke - and it's precisely the bizarre commentary that puts it over the top. It's awesome, earnest, witty, and totally cool.

We first laughed ourselves silly to MXC (Most Extreme Elimination Challenge), but of course we realize that the commentary has nothing to do with any real commentary by the Japanese original commentators. From there we were led to Ninja Warrior, which is a straighter translation, but in the same vein as UB.

I thoroughly despise sports commentators on American TV. The inane crap they spew makes me want to kick the TV in. "Well, John, I think they need to focus on that offense if they want to get the ball in the end zone." "That's right Bill, they really need to overcome the challenge the defense poses." No kidding.

What we really need are Japanese commentators for American sports. Now that would be commentary worth listening to.

FWIW, and IMHO, Subtitles > Dubbing.
posted by Xoebe at 11:01 PM on August 5, 2008


The Danish dub of Maisy the Mouse has been in high rotation at our house recently, since the remote control for the DVD player disappeared. The Region 4 Maisy disc defaults to Danish, and the front panel of the player doesn't let us navigate the menus.

Our three year old seems to like it just fine. Personally I prefer it. That idiot crocodile really does strike me as much more of a Gustau than a Charlie.
posted by flabdablet at 11:07 PM on August 5, 2008


Great read, awesome post, thanks.

So, purist motives aside, it seems like a good dub is actually more accurate/truer to the original than good subtitles?

I've watched quite a few films and tv shows dubbed from English into German, and one issue that I don't think I've seen mentioned here is the immense variability in the quality of the voice acting. Voices are extremely high bandwidth, in that they convey not just content, but emotion, and in some cases, even a sense of who the character is. In my experience, it is very unusual for people doing dubs to be particularly good actors, so the result is that the content is there, but the tone is completely lacking. I am American, so maybe I have a different perspective on this than a German would, but in my opinion, while a high-quality dub may be much better than a high-quality sub (The Lord of the Rings was very well dubbed, if I remember correctly), an average-quality dub is far far worse than an average quality sub.

A tad unrelated, but this post reminded me of Disney's practice of re-dubbing all their films for most of the major languages -- songs included.

This is probably obvious, but the major reason this is done with Disney films (and other content meant for small children) is that young children can't read.
posted by !Jim at 11:57 PM on August 5, 2008


Subtitles > Dubbing, no doubt!
For one thing, I wouldn't be an English speaker today if it weren't for subtitles. Seeing the Hebrew text while hearing the original English (during endless hours of TV watching, growing up in Israel in the 80's) all but taught me the language.
When i was five, as the family folklore goes, I surprised everyone with my English when my cousin from New York came to visit.
BTW, I'm on the scene too.
posted by Silky Slim at 1:23 AM on August 6, 2008


Thanks for the insight. I agree that if the dub isn't actually done by actors, I would far prefer subtitles. But I was thinking of the top of each game, respectively.

I wonder if directors care much either way (I assume they generally dislike both). On one hand, the visuals are being cluttered, obscured and attention may be drawn to parts of the "stage" when the intent was to show another. The flip is that wooden voice acting would be in itself so distracting as to ruin any mood in a shot.

I imagine the world market royalties probably more than make up for it.
posted by maxwelton at 1:23 AM on August 6, 2008


In france, dubbing is much preferred to subtitles, with the exception of brand new big film releases in cinemas.

Usually, each actor and actress has 'their' dubber; so Mel Gibson films always have the same guy doing his voice, for example. My bilingual fiance often finds it odd, after hearing an actor on tv for years with a particular french voice, to then hear how different their real voice is in english. Coming to CSI from Les Experts (french dubbed version) was a real culture shock. And yes, many dubs are utter rubbish.

Apparently you do get used to the mouth-flapping problem after a while though; but having been away from France for a while, it does now look very off to both of us when we go back.
posted by ArkhanJG at 2:13 AM on August 6, 2008


Another thing about dubbing it is not just necessary to get the language right, the accent must be right too.

Take '80s Hannah-Barbera cartoons. They already sucked enormously in their original versions. But I can tell you that the dubbed French and Spanish versions were even worse. Why? Hannah-Barbera was notoriously tight with money, as you may notice already by the crappy animation and continuous recycling of backgrounds, cels and entire scenes, so they only dubbed once for each language, and this with the least possible effort, thus in, respectively, Quebec and Puerto Rico.

Both Quebec French and Puerto Rican Spanish are far from the standard pronunciation of those languages. Moreover, they both have absorbed a large number of English words. To non-Quebeckers and non-Puerto Ricans, Fred Flintstone, Yogi, and Scooby-Doo's pesky kids thus sounded very-funny-to-completely-unintelligible. A far cry from Disney's gold-plated dubbing indeed.
posted by Skeptic at 3:20 AM on August 6, 2008


The worst subtitle I've seen recently was in Jackie Brown. Samuel Jackson says "who's that big Mandingo-lookin nigga" and the subtitle was "Wer ist dieser grosse Bimbo?", i.e. "who's that big bimbo".

Here in Germany only MTV subtitles things, and they mistranslate absolutely every single thing that a black person says. What they've done to Dave Chappelle is the worst kind of sin. But then I saw him dubbed on a different channel and in a way that was more awful. Also, don't try to watch the Cosby show dubbed into German, it'll raise your blood pressure for the next ten years.

Really what's needed is for a natural born American to glance over every finished translation, especially when any kind of slang is involved, but I guess no-one puts up the money for that. The German translators routinely misunderstand things, like when "I'm gonna put a cap in your ass" is translated roughly as "I'm gonna kick your ass" rather than "I'm gonna shoot you" -- every single time. I can understand the mistake, but really all they had to do is ask a fucking American.

I can't even watch the Simpsons here, it gives me the rabies for a few days. I lose my mind sometimes. Oh yeah, lately there was a South Park about Kathie Lee Gifford, and most of the voice actors pronounced it like "Kay-thee". I had to leave the room.
posted by creasy boy at 3:30 AM on August 6, 2008 [2 favorites]


I'm a bit surprised that he mentions subtitling a cartoon since, as others mention above, cartoons are almost universally dubbed. In this case, a big chunk of your audience can't even read!

One of the few, very few, redeeming things about the Hannah-Barbera cartoons is the distinct voices of the characters. In many countries, Mexico is a good example, they basically had the same set of people dubbing ALL the Hannah-Barbera cartoons. And they weren't particularly good at it.

I appreciate the point that the only time you really notice subtitles is when they are just wrong or horribly jarring. I still get irked at the subtitles for Fellini's La Strada. Zampano had some funny lines which were rendered flat by the translator. The extra strange twist of course is that Fellini dubbed his own movies. So Anthony Quinn was speaking English, was dubbed into Italian and then subtitled back into English.
posted by vacapinta at 3:50 AM on August 6, 2008


I am aware, for example, that Italian cinema tolerates a much freer relationship between the speaker's image and their heard words than is usual in the English-speaking world, and that this is entirely a fact of culture.

I believe this stems from the fact that even Italian films were dubbed a few decades ago (popping to mind is one from the Er Monnezza series, Squadra Antimafia which I caught on TV again the other night, but I've seen others, often enough that I don't notice it anymore.)

So, purist motives aside, it seems like a good dub is actually more accurate/truer to the original than good subtitles?

Here I've found that it frequently is better than the original. There have been cases where I saw a film first in Italian, thought "meh", then saw the original version and thought "wow, that's a piece of utter shit."

Case in point: the crappy lover's dialogue in Attack of the Clones is far more tolerable in Italian IMO. I was even surprised by how close the dubs for The Simpsons or South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, with only a few necessary concessions to make some cultural in-jokes relevant for an Italian audience.

There's few cases where I thought the original's feel wasn't or couldn't have been portrayed accurately in the dub. The goofball comedy genre like Austin Powers springs to mind but I can't think of any examples with a more serious theme at the moment.

(As in France a dubber's career shadows that of their actor/actress, to the point that people were thrown off when (IIRC) Robert De Niro's dubber suddenly died. And on preview, the accent question usually sees a Sicilian/Napolitano/Milanese accent used depending on the character)
posted by romakimmy at 4:09 AM on August 6, 2008


I love his description of the nightmare that is subtitling porn.

My favourite candidate for somebody who triumphed in translation hell is Gilbert Adair who translated George Perec's French book "La Disparition" into the English as "A Void". Both the original and the translated version make coherant, readable novels. However neither contains the letter "E".
posted by rongorongo at 4:46 AM on August 6, 2008 [2 favorites]


Aren't the dubs why Jerry Lewis is so popular in France?

I wonder how well subtitles are double-checked. I remember an episode of Lost focusing on Jin and Sun - who speak Korean, usually with English subtitles added. They were very dramatically talking about fleeing the country to get away from Sun's mob-bossish father when we got this subtitle:

Jin: A new life? If we run away, you're father would...

I mean, on a huge budget show where the subtitles aren't extras but a main part of the episode! So strange, perhaps a weird fluke.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 4:53 AM on August 6, 2008


The thing I hate most is when an actor says something, pauzes, and then completes his sentance with a punch line.
For a split second, I always think I have psychic abilities. Then I realize I was simply reading the subtitles and for some reason they always ignore the pauze and reveal the punchline together with the rest of the sentance.

Though I usually am impressed when the translator managed to find an alternative joke that works just as well as the original that was impossible to translate. It's like getting two jokes for the price of one.
posted by Timeless at 5:08 AM on August 6, 2008


Anyone interested in dubbing vs subtitling should rent or buy the DVD of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This is probably the gold standard of both (into English, at least), not least because you have the same actors you see on screen doing the dubbing.

It's fascinating to watch it with both dubbing and subtitling turned on, because the texts are completely different, illustrating the different constraints the two media are dealing with. The subtitles are clipped and direct, to answer the problem of reading. The dubbing is at times surprisingly flowery, to match mouth-movements and timing. They both get the same point across, more or less, but one is definitely taking the scenic route.

I don't speak Chinese, so I'm not fit to comment on the quality of the translation, but it doesn't seem to strike any false notes.
posted by adamrice at 6:04 AM on August 6, 2008


Really what's needed is for a natural born American to glance over every finished translation

This used to drive me batty. Over the years I've accepted the fact that 1) they don't really realize it's necessary, and 2) they wouldn't pay for it anyway, but it's still frustrating. And don't get me started on actors playing Americans who can't even fake a passable accent (anyone see Foyle's War recently?).
posted by languagehat at 6:05 AM on August 6, 2008 [1 favorite]


Other pet peeves worth mentioning:

1) Watching a black and white movie and having white subtitles appear against a white background.
2) Having a character say something and have no subtitle appear.
3) Understanding both the spoken language and the subtitles and getting distracted by just how much rich dialogue the subtitle-only bastards are missing.
posted by vacapinta at 6:56 AM on August 6, 2008


On a bored day at work a few years ago, I discovered that the Star Wars prequels play far better in their French or Spanish dubs with English subtitles. They did a terrific job of dubbing them, and the dialogue felt far less painful that way. Plus, during the "romantic" scenes between Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen, you can pretend you're watching a soap opera on Telemundo, and it makes a lot more sense.
posted by EarBucket at 7:17 AM on August 6, 2008 [1 favorite]


Over the years I've accepted the fact that 1) they don't really realize it's necessary, and 2) they wouldn't pay for it anyway, but it's still frustrating.

How much could it cost? It would take me an hour to compare a Simpsons transcript with a translation and send back some notes, and I'd be happy to do it for 50 Euros.

(Seriously -- if anyone here works for German MTV, VIVA or Pro Sieben, send me an email and we'll talk.)
posted by creasy boy at 7:26 AM on August 6, 2008


The Japanese subtitles for Austin Powers Goldmember were "directed" by London Boots, a famous comedy team in Japan, and they were great - it was one of the few Hollywood comedies I've seen in Japan where the Japanese audience gets to laugh too. There were lots of parts where the subtitles had almost no relation to the original English, as the translators had chosen to work in new jokes instead of just follow the literal meaning of the English. If I remember right, they even used the subtitles to do a few visual puns... It was a great example of what some imagination can do for a difficult subject.
posted by bakerybob at 7:31 AM on August 6, 2008


I always enjoy the black art of tweaking pop-culture references juust enough for non-American audiences. Abbott & Costello Laurel & Hardy; Spiro Agnew Bill Clinton; "C'mon, Giles, it's telly television-watching time! Passions The Simpsons is on and Timmy Bart's down the well!"
posted by ormondsacker at 8:01 AM on August 6, 2008


Hi there,

Any y'all ever see Finding Kraftland? I had to subtitle that into Mandarin. It hurt.

Now, I'm in the process of translating a right-wing Japanese propaganda film about the glory of kamikaze pilots into Mandarin (why don't they find native speakers to do these things?). This movie was written by a Japanese person and acted by Japanese actors, in English. No, wait, Engrish. I have a script, but I get nothing done because I'm cracking up all the time.

Back to work. This was just the break I needed.
posted by saysthis at 8:16 AM on August 6, 2008


Very interesting read, but I can't help but come away from it with the impression that this guy kind of hates his job. Strange, considering his tenacity in finding the book title (which, it must be noted, he doesn't share with us).

Subtitling requires a wide array of mental skills: you need to be analytic in ensuring that characters are represented well and plot points stay intact, you need to be creative in finding equivalencies, solutions and workarounds, you need an acutely ready vocabulary, and you need to be holistic in always keeping your eye on the prize, i.e. making sure the whole thing can stand on its own and stay reasonably true to the original while not seeming too contrived.

I contest Joe Clark's idea that subtitlers are too focused on space constraints: I feel the distraction argument is a convincing one. As has been noted, it it almost impossible not to glance at the captions even if you understand the audio language fluently; I've often wondered whether it would be possible to quantitatively measure how the viewing experience is affected by the presence of titles (in other words, how much people "miss" of the picture).

I agree that subtitles could be longer for some purposes, and in Holland I've noticed that they generally are for documentaries and other program material dealing with, shall we say, subjects of greater depth. But if I understand correctly, some if not most of the author's assignments have Dutch as a target language, and I feel compelled to mention the oft-cited notion that a decent grasp of English among educated Dutch is almost universal. This, I believe, may also influence subtitle length through a doubly complacent (perhaps doubly cynical) attitude from those in charge of paying for the translations: on the one hand, the more educated viewer will understand the language spoken anyway; on the other, those who don't won't understand the finer subtleties anyway, so let's just summarize the life out of everything and provide the titles as a minimal level of service. (I believe they're legally mandatory in some way, but I'd have to look up the details.)

This is very anecdotal and I have nothing but a quarter century of watching Dutch television to back it up, but I wouldn't be surprised if like with so many things, business plays a larger role than artisanship. (I will concede that some translators are Luddite curmudgeons allergic to change, though.)

I agree with creasy boy that having things checked by a linguistic and cultural native of the target language is a good idea, but I feel compelled to make the obvious point that any translator worth their salt should already have a thorough familiarity of their own with the culture(s) associated with the source language. Failing that they have online resources at their disposal - I've found Wikipedia to be a fantastic translation dictionary for casual use: just today I have used it to check whether Dutch distinguishes between meteors, meteorites and meteoroids the same way as English (it does), and to look up the Dutch word for "gargoyle".

In this case I am a native speaker of the target language, but it just so happens that I don't generally spend a lot of time talking about space trash or anthropomorphic ornaments. (It being Wikipedia, however, the usual caveats apply.)

Same goes for Urban Dictionary, by the way. Just like Wikipedia, it can be a great launch pad for getting the gist of something before veering off to research it further or check a citation. Lastly, I sometimes wonder what mysterious forces are holding these people back from, you know, consulting the author, as any decent literary translator will do?

I am reminded of an example creasy boy and I discussed earlier. In the South Park episode "Smug Alert!", an environmental threat is described, caused by people driving hybrid cars, called "smug". A Dutch friend of mine described this to me as an example of a challenging pun to translate. I don't know what the subtitler eventually went with (I've never actually seen the episode), but after mentally reviewing a few more complex, overly long compound nouns that would totally suck the life out of the joke ("zelfingenomenheidsvervuiling", "arrogantiegas") I decided I would have settled for "snob".

Very coincidentally, when I was in Berlin last month creasy boy and I were talking about translation and he brought up this exact example, noting that in the German dub they had used this exact same word. Now, this example serves to illustrate that creativity is as valuable a skill in subtitling as is economy, sure - but also that the quality of translation is very much in the eye of the beholder: if you're not a native speaker of the target language (or perhaps even if you are but you're influenced by second-language knowledge of the source language, but I'm getting tenuous here), translations tend to seem clumsier than they are, I feel. (Not to mention the confounding effect of cognates and false friends.)

So in this example, it just so happens that "snob" has roughly the same meaning in Dutch and German as it does in English, but "smug" doesn't. (In this case, it's not a word in Dutch, and I'm fairly certain it's not in German, either.) So if you're a native speaker of English, "snob" may seem like a fairly watered-down substitution, but I'd argue in Dutch it doesn't (I can't speak for German), because in the viewer's mind - if you'll allow me the emphasis - there is nothing is being substituted. (I'd argue that "smug" is a pretty advanced word for the average ESL speaker.)

All this goes to say that I sympathize with the "house on fire" analogy, really.

Lastly, while I generally feel Dutch subtitling on the whole is quite decent, at least on the public broadcasters, creasy boy's (truly unforgivable, indeed) "Mandingo" example reminds me of how I told him how atrocious the translations are on Comedy Central Nederland, but failed to actually provide any examples. So here are two of my favourites, both from Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps:

(Jonny finds a lemon zester.)
"Wow, you've even got a zester!"
-"Wauw, jullie hebben zelfs een Zester-rasp!"
"Wow, you've even got a Zester grater!" (as if it were a brand name)
["zesteur" or "citroenrasp" would have been correct.]

and

(Donna's sex-obsessed mother notes an improvement in Donna's mood since she started seeing Gaz.)
"You always come home with this post-coital flush."
-"Je komt altijd thuis met een post-coitale bloeding."
"You always come home with this post-coital haemorrhage." (!)
["blos" or "gloed" would have been correct.]

If you're one of those people who can stomach his meandering style (I am), Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language is a wonderful, giddy ode to the joy and terror of translation; and for speakers of Dutch, translator Bartho Kriek collects specimens of particularly amusing subtitling FAIL on his website.

I'm starting to believe I'm missing out on my life's calling.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 8:21 AM on August 6, 2008 [2 favorites]


The discussion here has been more fun than the original article.

I've always been a big fan of subtitling over dubbing (except in rare cases, like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"). IIRC, Anthony Burgess' _A Mouthful of Air_ had a fun chapter on dubbing.
posted by QIbHom at 8:24 AM on August 6, 2008


instead of titles, there was a live simultaneous translation by a man talking over a loudspeaker in the theater.

Interesting. In the days before talkies in Japan, movies would often have a benshi (弁士, narrator) who recited all the parts aloud. This practice actually predates movies in Japan—it's also used in puppet theater, so in a Japanese context, it has cultural continuity.

I had a chance to see a Japanese silent with a benshi, and she was amazing. She had a distinct voice for each character on-screen, and switched between them instantly. Her readings were anything but flat. It was like real-time voiceover. After a while, you kind of forgot that it was one person doing all the voices.
posted by adamrice at 8:29 AM on August 6, 2008


Helly good news!

any translator worth their salt should already have a thorough familiarity of their own with the culture(s) associated with the source language.


Yeah, but I have a feeling that it'd be hard for anyone to have a thorough familiarity with the culture of the entire English-speaking world. Even understanding just America is hard enough. I think my mother wouldn't understand half the jokes in Curb Your Enthusiasm. As an example: there's an episode where a rapper, Crazy-Eyes Killah, says something like "I'll nut in your eye". Later on Larry's talking about how scared he is of the rapper and says something like, "He'll put a nut in my eye. What kind of an image is that?!" The joke is that Larry doesn't understand the hip-hop slang of "nuttin'" and the audience does. But if you don't understand it, then you might not even know that you don't understand it, since Larry doesn't either. And if you're not getting paid much, you don't look up absolutely everything that seems out of the ordinary. I mean, I do, but I shouldn't. And if you did think that "nut in your eye" sounded strange, how would you look it up? Would you look up "nut"? "Nutting"? If you google "nuttin" you get hits for the mispelling of "nothing". Eventually you give up. And how many Germans, no matter how well-versed in American literature and film, are familiar with "nuttin" in the sense of ejaculation? Maybe 5 at most, I'd guess -- although it's clear as day to anyone who grew up in America in the last 20 years.
posted by creasy boy at 9:31 AM on August 6, 2008


As for Wikipedia, I use it all the time. I cross-check absolutely every historical term in Wikipedia. Maria Theresia is Maria Theresa in English. Who could know that? And when Germans talk about a King Ludwig, they mean Louis, the French guy. I would never have caught on to that without automatically checking in Wikipedia -- for all I know, there could easily have been a king named Ludwig somewhere. Why not?
posted by creasy boy at 9:36 AM on August 6, 2008


Yeah, I will admit that I'm a bit of an elitist in this way, and I'm probably overestimating the average translator and the lengths they will go to look things up etc. Also, that hip hop culture, African American vernacular and the like can be among the trickiest things to translate, and that not everything can be looked up. (This can, however.) But that doesn't take away from the criticism that if translators don't at least make an effort to look stuff like this up, they are not using instruments that are directly at their disposal and hence, aren't doing their job very well, really.

For what it's worth, I for one was familiar with the term as a noun but had never heard it used as a verb before. So influenced by hindsight I can't really know whether I would have figured it out on my own.

Here's the YouTube of the first instance in the episode, by the way.

And for what it's worth, in this case I would leave the rap lyrics untranslated (no titles), and translate the later reference in speech literally. I believe this would reflect the character's confusion using a similarly nonsensical phrase, while avoiding having to semantically link it to the earlier instance (after all, the fact that he is referring back to something from the rap lyrics is implied). You solve a problem, you lose a (minor) joke. Burning house.

Dutch TV subtitlers don't generally translate song lyrics unless they are absolutely central to the plot, I believe. In any case, if we assume that to an American audience it's a matter of whether you can understand the rap lyrics in the first place too, the most important question for the translator becomes whether this should be reflected in the translation using the target language. I would say no: an even smaller share of the target language audience will understand every nuance of the rap lyrics than with the source language audience, but it's just not worth jumping through a lot of hoops trying to compensate for that. And, as I argued, the theme of the "knowingness" of the audience, like Larry's, is explicit in the original as well.

I guess for dubbing this would be quite different though.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 10:33 AM on August 6, 2008


I just want to report one particular feat in subtitling: the subtitle for "Garfield" the movie was so hip and funny that the movie became a big hit there.
posted by of strange foe at 10:52 AM on August 6, 2008


goodnewsfortheinsane: I sometimes wonder what mysterious forces are holding these people back from, you know, consulting the author, as any decent literary translator will do?

You know how in the universe it's turtles all the way down? Well in translation it's middlemen.

Like the author of the original article said, a typical movie is 2, maybe 3 days of work. Alright, well, assume that the writer of the movie wasn't present during edits, or that it was collaboratively edited, or that the director made some on-scene changes. What I get is the transcript, through my agent, or whatever contact I've got (in my case a minor distro house that mostly acts as an overflow outsource agency catering to Beijing-based distribution houses), and we're usually in a different country, our sales guy sends them to our management, who arranges the specifics of the deal and then sends them to me, who sends them down to one of our freelancers with a cutthroat deadline (most of the work we get is "we fucked up, h4lp!). A book can take weeks, months, sometimes years to translate, and that's expected. Movies are much more collaborative, and involve a lot of input, and work on a lot shorter timeframe. In some cases where the moviemaker comes to us directly we have this option, but most of the time it just isn't gonna happen.
posted by saysthis at 11:09 AM on August 6, 2008


I guess for dubbing this would be quite different though.

I don't know, in Family Guy, Simpsons, South Park etc. over here they often drop the dubbing for the songs, though not always. So you hear Homer's real voice for a few minutes, with subtitles, in the middle of a dubbed show. It's weird.
posted by creasy boy at 11:32 AM on August 6, 2008


saysthis: "In some cases where the moviemaker comes to us directly we have this option, but most of the time it just isn't gonna happen."

That's a good point, saysthis, and I realize I was working with quite a few idealistic assumptions up-thread.

creasy boy: "I don't know, in Family Guy, Simpsons, South Park etc. over here they often drop the dubbing for the songs, though not always. So you hear Homer's real voice for a few minutes, with subtitles, in the middle of a dubbed show. It's weird."

Wait - what, really? I was going to ask this, but I do find this totally weird, indeed.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 12:15 PM on August 6, 2008


adamrice: I believe the statistics-based baseball coaching system you refer to actually originated in the United States by a guy named Bill James and is known as Sabermetrics. Michael Lewis wrote a book about Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A's, called Moneyball which brought Sabermetrics into the mainstream. Theo Epstein, GM of the Red Sox, used Sabermetrics (and magic!) to break the curse in the 2004. You shoulda come to askmefi with your translation query! We woulda figured it out in less time than it took you to read the Japanese wikipedia article.
posted by incessant at 12:33 PM on August 6, 2008


incessant: Swing and a miss. In this case, the name of the method is Nomura Important Data, or 野村 ID, or ID 野球. Whether this was derived from Sabermetrics, I don't know. The Japanese Wikipedia article on Sabermetrics doesn't mention any connection between the two.

And more to the point, all I had in the source document was the phrase "野村ID," with no context that would suggest its meaning.
posted by adamrice at 12:52 PM on August 6, 2008


Yeah, I was just watching the Family Guy where Peter starts his own nation and sings his own version of Can't Touch Me. The song was undubbed, but the commentary in the middle was dubbed. And the line "from Hartford to Back Bay" was translated in the subtitles as "von Hartford zu Bombay".
posted by creasy boy at 1:17 PM on August 6, 2008


I imagine there's a big gulf between "can do solid voice acting" and "can do solid in-character singing"; doing the songs could be a logistical nightmare compared to the rest of the VO.
posted by cortex at 1:32 PM on August 6, 2008


Goodnewsfortheinsane, you need to distinguish between occasional subtitling viewers and nonstop captioning viewers. Nonetheless, both groups will spend most of their time doing the intended thing: Reading.

I don’t know if my pile of subtitling research papers backs this up, but my pile of captioning research papers does.
posted by joeclark at 3:29 PM on August 6, 2008


Here's a review from the NYT of Le Ton beau de Marot which I think nails most of it. Me, I can't get past the hideous title.
posted by Wolof at 4:00 PM on August 6, 2008


He categorically dismisses all free verse as esthetically repellent and a betrayal of poetry. He is prepared to consign Robert Pinsky to the ninth circle of hell for translating Dante with slant rhyme and not preserving the terza rima scheme. He permits himself a 20-page tantrum against Nabokov for objecting to verse translation, in the course of which he actually characterizes ''Lolita'' as ''popular pedophilic pornography'' and describes the exquisitely lyric ''Speak, Memory'' as ''quasi-photographic.''

I have just lost interest in this book. Thanks for the warning, Wolof.
posted by languagehat at 4:58 PM on August 6, 2008


@creasy boy: the horrible german translations of english cartoons, sitcoms and movies have a positive effect though: if you can't stand to watch them anymore, you're forced to get the untranslated originals and practice your language skills that way. My english isn't perfect, but it would probably be a lot worse without that motivator.

I know a lot of people right now who are starting to watch american tv shows with the emergence of bittorrent, and all of them prefer to watch english versions, even if shows get dubbed for german tv. Most recent example is "Dead like me". Haven't seen it, but I heard it's unbearable to watch in german. Right now there's a huge demand for my old CD's.
posted by kolophon at 6:26 PM on August 6, 2008


thanks for the video, magnusbe. I thought I was the only one who hated those annoying fansubbing habits.
How bad they have to be, if they even make a non-native speaker cringe.
posted by kolophon at 6:31 PM on August 6, 2008


Wolof: I should probably add that I may seem in some sense above to be refashioning a cultural phenomenon as a natural one, and doubtless thus represent the pallid shrieking head of bourgeois normativism attempting to claim the universality of my own prejudices. I am aware, for example, that Italian cinema tolerates a much freer relationship between the speaker's image and their heard words than is usual in the English-speaking world, and that this is entirely a fact of culture. My observation hinges, rather, on the centrality of synchronism itself to the cinematic experience, and how and where that synchronism is more tightly or more loosely experienced.

Subtitle: "Your mileage may vary."
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:46 PM on August 6, 2008


kolophon: yeah, I guess that's where MTV is actually a force for good in Germany...they seem to subtitle all their reality shows. Most likely because one translator is cheaper than a bunch of actors. If you're going to show Flava Flav, there's no point in overdubbing him.

Although a lot of people here like the dubbed version of The Nanny.
posted by creasy boy at 1:42 AM on August 7, 2008


joeclark, thanks for piping up. Could you elaborate, though? I understand how the distinction is relevant, but how exactly? Are you saying short subtitles are okay for translation titles, but not for same-language closed captioning?

And languagehat, please do give it a chance. You will probably either love it or hate it (and I did give a caveat on the style when I mentioned it), but it's a personal, idiosyncratic and highly passionate book with just the slightest tinge of curmudgeonliness, so it might just be for you. The review is cherry-picking bizarre manifestations of the latter, sure, but it's really not representative of the book at large (plus, I believe it's perfectly normal for any self-respecting snobs to be randomly fascist about a handful of works and authors.)
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 4:37 AM on August 7, 2008


Oh, and: kolophon!

Do you guys (creasy, kolophon, others) think, then, that dubbing is doomed?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 4:41 AM on August 7, 2008


I can only imagine and hope that German TV itself is doomed, since they have absolutely nothing to offer but badly dubbed American products. I think increasingly all college-educated Germans will give up on TV and use the internet for their entertainment needs. I'd have switched over to bittorrents a long time ago, except that my girlfriend can't always understand spoken English and needs subtitles. We watched all of Sopranos on DVD with English sound/English subtitles, and soon we're gonna start on The Wire. The day they shown Sopranos on TV here, dubbed, is the day I go terrorist.

Either that, or: someone will need to invent and market a system whereby you can order shows on TV and choose subtitling options. I don't see why they couldn't just show all of HBO and Comedy Central here with subtitling options.
posted by creasy boy at 6:05 AM on August 7, 2008


Oh dude, I completely agree. I'd pay for that, easily.

Sorry if this veers off onto yet another tangent, but do you guys get the BBC at all? We get One and Two on basic cable, and Three, Four, Prime and World on digital, I think. Because I watch the Beeb all the time with captions on. Hell, I even watch Dutch TV with captions, I just find it easier to follow when I'm not focused 100% on the TV, which is almost always. I only really turn them off for quiz shows (often you get the answer way early) and live broadcasts.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:45 AM on August 7, 2008


I don't see why they couldn't just show all of HBO and Comedy Central here with subtitling options.

Interesting. Cable here (or rather the cable options here, Sky) has original language & subtitle options for English, though not always for every show or channel.

I imagine there's a big gulf between "can do solid voice acting" and "can do solid in-character singing"; doing the songs could be a logistical nightmare compared to the rest of the VO.

Intending to illustrate that occasionally songs are translated, I went a'Googling for clips of "Spiderpig" from the Simpsons movie, which I found funnier in Italian.

One of the first results was an Italian blogger comparing the two versions. To sum up for those that don't read Italian, in his opinion the dubbing didn't do justice to the original joke, as the reference to Spiderman could have been overlooked by the viewer, and the ditty is in fact an homage to the original Spiderman theme song.

But then I went a'Googling for the Italian lyrics for the original Spiderman theme song and lo, the song is totally different from its English original. So the homage to the theme song is somewhat lost in translation by keeping the tune of the English version, but the end goal of funny Spider pig/porc was still kept.

//end rambling side track
//Spiderporc!
posted by romakimmy at 7:49 AM on August 7, 2008


Hmm, Italian Homer has a really deep voice. German Homer is more high-pitched.

We get one BBC channel here, and some version of CNN. But we only have about 30-35 channels. Of those 30, at any given moment three are showing Spongebob (dubbed), three or four have quiz shows at night or courtoom shows during the day, two just have ads for ring-tones, three of them have documentaries about old people eating a sandwich or fixing a tractor or talking over the fence, five of them have German cop shows that are all basically indistinguishable from one another, one has a show called Gallileo that shows you how sausage is made every fucking week, there's CNN and BBC, there's MTV and a clone of MTV, and then the only things left are dubbed versions of The Nanny or Home Improvement or some movie like Home Alone or some fucking Segal movie (dubbed). I guess I forgot Arte, which is sometimes decent. Otherwise, if you're lucky MTV is playing Family Guy (dubbed), and if you're unlucky they're showing some fifth-generation clone of Flava of Love for a two-hour block. "Rock of Love" or "17 self-styled 'gangstas' learn to play cricket in one big fucking house" or some other show that's basically premised on out-of-work actors living in a big house for a month.
posted by creasy boy at 8:18 AM on August 7, 2008 [1 favorite]


Subtitling and captioning are two different things even if the British insist they aren’t. In both cases the intended usage is reading the words on the screen, yet still people are surprised when exactly that happens.

The first time you see a subtitled production you will be surprised to find yourself reading the screen. The umpteenth time, you have no business being surprised. It’s what you’re supposed to be doing.
posted by joeclark at 3:16 PM on August 7, 2008


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