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I've spent a considerable amount subtitling a TV series, and there were subtitles floating around for it before I started, but they contained a ton of bad Engli
by henrikschroder 6y ago
I've spent a considerable amount subtitling a TV series, and there were subtitles floating around for it before I started, but they contained a ton of bad English; wrong idioms, and wrong word order.
But when I did my translation, I tried to stick to the word order and expressions of the original language when possible. You could translate each sentence to the most likely way an English-speaking person would express themselves, but can also stray a bit, pick something that's closer to the original, but still works. I wanted to subtly remind people that they're not in Kansas anymore. Even though the show is a teen high school drama, it's absolutely not an American high school, so you can't use words associated with that either.
One example from the French remake: In English, a conventional piece of dialogue goes "I love you" - "I love you too".
But in French, that dialogue goes "Je t'aime" - "Moi aussi". So in this case we actually picked "Me too" as the translation for that, which definitely sticks out, but comes across as a little bit of a teaching French moment, because you can clearly hear that the character isn't saying "Je t'aime aussi".
That's kinda what you were looking for, right?
However, somewhere there is a line, across which lies a sea of Bad English, and even further from that line, you get the incomprehensible gibberish of the work in the article, and you really, really don't want to end up there.
- kome 6y ago"But in French, that dialogue goes "Je t'aime" - "Moi aussi". So in this case we actually picked "Me too" as the translation for that, which definitely sticks out, but comes across as a little bit of a teaching French moment, because you can clearly hear that the character isn't saying "Je t'aime aussi"." true! and to be honest, also the first one isn't probably meaning "je t'aime" at all
- ant6n 6y agoLiterally “I thou like/love”
- js2 6y agoThere's multiple translations of the closing dialog in Breathless. (Of course, even the English title isn't a literal translation of À bout de souffle—that would be Out of Breath.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathless_(1960_film)#Closing_dialogue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathless_(1960_film)#Closi...
- henrikschroder 6y agoThat's a pretty cool example of how some pieces of dialogue are just untranslateable. There's a common misconception among a lot of people, and definitely among the HN crowd, that there exists a good translation for every sentence in every language to every other language. I remember some articles a year ago or so here about how Google Translate had supposedly created some kind of internal language through its ML algorithms and data. Yeah, but no. Google Translate would completely fail on that dialogue from Out of Breath, and if you were relying on it, you wouldn't even know it had failed!