Subtitles: a request

[mrissa]

One of the great things about Netflix, I have discovered in the few months we’ve had it, is that I can watch a variety of foreign films and TV without having to pay through the nose for it. Hurrah, Netflix! Yesterday I watched a Chinese movie with my workout, and today a Danish cop show, The Eagle. Both were fun, and I am definitely continuing with the Danish cop show. I especially like to language-geek about translation choices: I only know about ten words of Chinese, but one of them is “kill,” so I can tell when the crowd is chanting that rather than the “Fight!” the subtitler has chosen to put at the bottom of the screen. And I love thinking about choices like that and when it’s a matter of bad translation, when it’s a matter of cultural difference being recognized, when it’s a matter of subtle shades of meaning.

But the last few days have given me a new plea for subtitlers.

Subtitlers: please, please, please indicate change of language in the conversations you’re subtitling. I can hear the difference between Danish and Icelandic*, but I’m not sure that should be your default assumption when you’re subtitling in English–especially when there’s characterization stuff about who reacts in which ways to the Icelandic. And once you get into Middle Eastern languages, I can tell you that the characters have stopped speaking Danish, but I cannot tell by ear what language they are speaking, except I can tell Indo-European from non-Indo-European given enough time and sample sentences, mostly, sort of. And therefore rule out Pashtun, Persian, etc. if I’m lucky. In the case of this show, I assume that the characters who were not speaking Danish, Icelandic, or Arabic (which was clearly labeled in the dialogue that the character would speak it and why, so good there) were speaking some dialect of Turkish, because culturally that is who is likely to not get labeled in Denmark as unusual or in some way interesting. But it still would have been nice to not be just completely guessing.

It is pure blind luck that I know enough Japanese language structure to be able to say, “Wait, that was Japanese, not Chinese,” and again: only if I am really paying attention to the dialog as it is spoken by the actors and not just as its meaning is conveyed by the subtitles. That is a level of attention I don’t always have available to use, and I can easily imagine situations in which I could not perform the analysis required to get there. And while it can be a fun intellectual exercise, it’s generally not supposed to be the point of the viewing experience for most viewers, I wouldn’t think. It makes the focus on the meta-story instead of the story.

So please. Use different colors of subtitling, or put the language marker in brackets at the beginning when they change, or something. Dumping it all into English–or whatever else you’re subtitling it in–is not enough. I get why, for example, in many Asian languages the translator will choose to use some form of the character’s name when that’s clearly not what the actor is saying: because many of the social-honorific forms don’t really translate to English without needless exoticizing. I just don’t think that switching languages within a subtitled work falls into that sort of subtle judgment category.

So what are your favorite subtitling problems, bloopers, or beautiful incongruities?

*Here is your quick and dirty, entirely parochial, guide to distinguishing the Scandinavian languages by ear: Danish is the one that sounds funny. Icelandic is the one that sounds fancy. Swedish and Norwegian both sound normal, but Swedish sounds the pointy end of normal and Norwegian sounds the squishy end of normal.** And Faroese sounds like you’re trying to talk with a sheep on your head. You’re welcome; don’t say I never gave you anything.

I have no idea whether this is useful to anyone but me, actually, but that’s how I do it.

**Once you’re distinguishing between Nynorsk and Bokmål, you’re a) very inside baseball, and b) really talking about dialect rather than language inasmuch as the two categories are distinguishable at all. So just give yourself a gold star at that point and move on, unless you actually, you know, speak Norwegian.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

Comments

[tanac.livejournal.com]

Finnish counts as Scandinavian in most circles..... (It's the one that sounds oddly like Spanish unless you actually listen to it, wherein your brain days 'wait, what *is* that?')

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I think of Finnish as the one that sounds like Elvish. Though I know that's exactly backwards.

It's also in a completely different language group from Norwegian/Danish/Swedish/et al., so whether it counts as "Scandinavian" may be a controversial point.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I've seen some Chinese movies where I could tell when characters were speaking non-Mandarin dialects of Chinese, because the subtitles there would be in both English and Mandarin. But, yeah, I would love to see it made general practice to distinguish somehow when different languages were being used.

If I ever travel to the Faroe islands, I'll be sure to pack a small ungulate along with my phrasebook.

[zelda888.livejournal.com]

No, no, you go to the Faroe Islands to *obtain* a small ungulate, or at least their products. Taking your own would be insulting, like taking your own sheets when you're a houseguest.

Tangentially, I want a translation of _War and Peace_ that translates the Russioan into English, but leaves the French as French. I've heard a rumor that such a thing does exist...

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Only if the people in those circles are really unclear on just how different Finnish is from a Scandinavian language and haven't heard it, because you really cannot understand Finnish at all if you haven't studied it, whereas you have a fighting chance to guess at Swedish, Danish or Norwegian if you've studied German or French.

[carbonel]

Hebrew is the language I have the best hope of understanding, and I haven't watched many movies in Hebrew. But one of them, Sallah had a joke about water faucets (the immigrants from Yemen hadn't encountered them before) that wasn't translated exactly. Both versions were at least mildly amusing, but they weren't the same thing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Finnish is not even Indo-European, much less Scandinavian.

This is one of the reasons why there's some difference about what "the Scandinavian countries" are, and why the term "the Norden" exists: under many rubrics, Finnish counts as Scandinavian, and under others it definitely does not, and having the ability to distinguish with terms is quite useful.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

(This is why it was very strange to discover that I could accurately distinguish phrases like "Väinämöinen got in the boat" in the middle of sung Finnish.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's one of my favorite interesting questions: which language would have the same place/meaning in another culture? Because I don't think that French holds the same place in English and in Russian, exactly. (I can see the argument of just leaving the bits you can just leave, but I think French is too often not translated or at least not footnoted in English. And I actually read French; I just don't think that reading French is mandatory for all interested Anglophone readers.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you think that the Hebrew version was accessible as funny to Americans who did not speak Hebrew? This is not a rhetorical question; humor is one of the things that is most difficult to translate.

[tanac.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm well aware it's a different language group entirely; my reference was to it as a scandinavian country.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I think a translation as described above would be interesting and a better translation because, at the time of its writing, both educated Anglophones and Russian-speakers were likely to learn French as their first additional language. Footnoting would be nice, and even though I read French I would really LOVE an appendix with the translations of Uncle Paul's letters to Lord Peter Wimsey now that it's not courting obscenity charges or public disapproval to publish them in English -- but I think it'd be great to see the French left as French to leave it marked that the characters had shifted to another language.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Footnotes and appendices seem like a good way to handle this. But in prose you can also just say, "He wrote in French," if you don't want to jar readers out for that long.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I threw ONE quote in French into my novel... I didn't translate, but it's mostly cognates, with one reasonably familiar noun that it hinges on. It's also not exactly obscure. In prose, handling long passages that way for a non-bilingual audience is sensible. I'm dead sure that Lord Peter's uncle wrote to him in French so Dorothy Sayers could say naughtier things than she'd have been allowed to in English, though. :D

also I wanted to say that even though I don't speak any of the Scandinavian languages, I have heard some As They Are Spoke, and your relative descriptions of them had me howling at the accuracy. Couldn't speak to the inside-baseball part, but pointy and squishy are SO TRUE.

[zelda888.livejournal.com]

There isn't anything that has the same place, at least in American English. We have precious little custom of learning another language, let alone going on to speak it to our families to show the servants how far above them we are. There are plenty of class markers in American speech, but nothing so conscious and deliberate.

I'm certainly not arguing against translating the French, because your point is well taken. I'm just in favor of having the additional option.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hee, thanks.

Well, and: I think that Dorothy Sayers honestly did not think about an audience for her books that would not have had French and Latin. I think it's better that we do think about it, even if the answer we come up with is the same.

[zelda888.livejournal.com]

I didn't remember Uncle Paul's letters being so racy as all that, but maybe it's bacause I lack the vocabulary. And now I can't find them-- are they in Busman's Honeymoon?

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I have to admit I feel smug at being able to read the letters in French, just as I feel smug when I hear some people call Jane Austen's English "hard". But it's definitely a good thing to be aware of your audience.

Of course, I'm probably guilty of a bit of snobbery myself, considering how many commas my editor made me take out (IN A REGENCY NOVEL) on the grounds that, although they were correct, they weren't commonly seen in modern usage and people who didn't have a solid familiarity with 19th-century grammar would THINK they were wrong. (I sulked a lot over that. By the end of the manuscript I was leaving petulant notes about how those were respectable, God-fearing parenthetical commas and they were STAYING. Ahem.)

I decided that my quote worked in context and was also super-easy to Google if anyone was really that baffled. As the thing will be primarily released as an e-book, they can even Google right from within the book if they're so inclined.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's where they are.

They're not graphic, exactly, more lyrical, but they're pretty frank, for the time frame, on the topic of sex. I think she would have gotten raised eyebrows, at the least, if she'd tried to put the same things in the clear.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Now I want to know how The Game of Kings was translated.

[betedanslecoeur.livejournal.com]

This is more of a tangent, but I like to watch films with subtitles and then the same films with dubbing (where the dubbing is bearable). There are often fascinating differences.

I'm particularly reminded of Studio Ghibli's Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (Howl's Moving Castle) here. I remember the tone and content of several jokes and flippant remarks being quite different between the subtitles and the professional dubbing by Disney. Mostly cultural, I think, with the subbing being more accurate to the Japanese intent. Definitely a different attitude toward old people between the two.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I read French just barely enough to get by, and not enough to get by with Uncle Paul's letters. I didn't realize there was anything off-color in them.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Whereas I want an edition of Busman's Honeymoon that translates the French.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Most of us, at least, read faster than people speak, so having additional information in the captions compared to the actual speech isn't obviously absurd. But I do like some time to look at the rest of the screen too.

(Hmm; various Google hits say the average adult reading rate is 250 or 300 words per minute, so not as much faster than speech as I thought; professional announcers can do 200 sometimes.)

Mostly it's European languages, or languages of people assigned to obvious ethnic categories already in the movie (Japanese soldiers in WWII, or something), so mostly they don't bother to label the language explicitly (apparently we're all supposed to recognize at least French and German). I suspect the proper solution is to have the language clues planted in the actual script, since if the movie is going to go to various audiences around the world it's just not reasonable to expect most of them to recognize more than half a dozen major world languages with any confidence, and it's hard to add that information later.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Like I said, more lyrical than crude, but he is DEFINITELY going on a bit about sex and giving possibly embarrassing advice to his nephew, with specific attention to Harriet's personality.