Asklemmy@lemmy.mlbyLtDan@lemmy.zip
4 hours

If you speak another language besides ENG, are the subtitles terrible?

English

I’m mainly talking about watching a TV show or movie that’s originally in English enabling subtitles that’s either in Spanish, German, Russian, Finnish, etc. and can mistakes in translation still occur? I recall watching Lie to Me with Japanese subtitles during a scene involving an interrogation but a key word within the dialog was not translated correctly based on context.

For example, the protagonist said “You’re an accessory for murder” towards the suspect but subtitles used the wrong word choice 小物 (which means “accessories” as in small goods, i.e. stationery or trinkets) when the intended meaning for “accessory” from that context leans more on being a conspirator (共犯者 or 共謀) of a crime (like as in aiding the criminal).

27
    • FRYD@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4 hours

      Not usually. The sentences are often different from how I would understand them, but get the general idea in a way that’s easy to digest.

    • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
      4 hours

      When you watch a movie in public with native audio and subtitles and you speak or understand the audio language, you’ll often hear scattered laughter before the main audience laughs because often the subtitles have a delay for the punchline of a joke, which means that those who already heard the joke laughed at the moment it happened, not a second or more later when the subtitles arrive.

      Most of the time the subtitles match the audio, sometimes they change a cultural reference, or infrequently completely get the translation wrong for no apparent reason which can become a new accedental joke all on its own. Then there’s weird ones where numbers like someone’s age or the time are wrong.

      Source: I speak multiple human languages to various degree … and way too many technology ones. I’m also going deaf, so I have closed captioning on most of the time.

    • lil_tank [any, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8 hours

      My teachers at uni often said “To translate is to betray”. All translations have to make choices about what they want to preserve from the original and what to dish out. If you want to convey the exact meaning of everything you end up fucking up the rhythm and structure by breaking down each term into sometimes a whole sentence. If you preserve the length, which movie subtitles have to do, you have to use terms and expressions that match around 50% of the original meaning

    • Random_Character_A@lemmy.world
      10 hours

      Finnish here.

      Since nothing is dubbed, people here understand English quite fluently and only read subtitles occasionally when the speech is unclear. Switch is mostly unconscious.

      Mistakes are actually rare and fun when you spot one. It’s usually due to translator not being familiar with idiom or proverb. Sometimes they are an interesting reminders how finno-ugric and germanic languages handle things differently.

      Only times it can get annoying is when there’s something untranslatable like puns or other kind of wordplay. Translator just wings it and pulls something really stupid.

      • LtDan@lemmy.zipEnglish
        9 hours

        It also depends on the genre which can affect subtitle quality and difficulty on translation:

        • Legal Drama + Crime: contains specific jargon
        • Political + Military: has technical jargon
        • Romance + Teen: has simpler dialog

        For instance, Japanese has honorifics: so something like “Your Honor” (as in refering to the judge) is subtitled as 裁判長. Also when watching let’s say US Crime / Legal stuff: there’s concepts that do not cross over in Finnish (i.e. Plead the Fifth) that are specific within their region, so translators will have to look up what that means and convey it correctly while retaining the “legalese”.

        Like this, how are you going to subtitle “FBI” / “ATF” / “ICE” into Finnish since those acronyms are specific to the American system? That’s where the real challenge begins via translation, also accounting with their own terminology (i.e. police slang).

        I remember reading something funny via subtitles: the caller dialled 911 as the victim was being attacked but the Japanese subs changed it to 110 (which is Japan’s equivalent). Although the main setting of the movie literally takes place in the United States so they could’ve just left it as it is.

        • jbrains@sh.itjust.works
          5 hours

          Hofstadter, Le ton beau de Marot. For anyone who wants to read deeply about this kind of translation problem.

    • Truffle@lemmy.ml
      11 hours

      For a while I had a side job correcting subtitles that had context mistakes. It was fun and some people would look me up to work for them if they needed something very specific, mostly independent movies and a couple of things for netflix. Now with AI that side gig is no more but the auto generated stuff is pretty terrible.

    • Burray_Mookchin@lemmy.ml
      11 hours

      They’re usually fine when you have subs in a different language than the audio. Where it gets frustrating is when you’re watching something in English audio with english subs and the words in the subtitles differ from the spoken words. It happens especially often when the original Audio language is something other than English. It’s awful

      • manxu@piefed.socialEnglish
        10 hours

        I find that infuriating, too. Someone told me the reason is that the dubbing and the subtitling are done in parallel from the original material, instead of the subtitling being done from the dubbing text. Regardless, it’s super annoying to miss a word in the spoken dialog and find that the subtitles have a completely different sentence.

        • MyButSmellsBat@feddit.org
          10 hours

          Tom Scott made a enjoyable video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU9sHwNKc2c

          tl:dr dubbing and subtitles are made by diffent teams and each one has their own limitations.

          Dubbing has to line up with lip movement. Subtitles were in the past summeries and struggle for example when multible people are talking at the same time

          • manxu@piefed.socialEnglish
            9 hours

            That was very informative, thank you! I love Tom Scott’s videos, but somehow missed this one.

            The odd thing is that he brings up the obvious question: why do the subtitlers not simply use the dubber’s translation instead of doing their own. He brings up the need in the past for summaries (which could be done from the dubber’s translation, so I don’t see the point), but then doesn’t explain why we still do the same.

            It’s particularly odd because streaming brought a Renaissance of dubbing - streaming shows are frequently dubbed, dubbed to a lot of languages, and the dubbing is of high quality. On some streaming services (I think Netflix), the dubbing teams proudly have their own closing cards at the end of each episode. And yet, they continue this strange habit.

            • MyButSmellsBat@feddit.org
              7 hours

              True, they are doing the work of translating twice.

              And sometimes there are existing two types of subtitles, but the standard case is that it’s based on the original language. For learning italian i searched a lot for subtitles that are based on the italian dupped version. It often has a “forced” in the filename (and is unfortunatly quite difficult to find)

    • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
      12 hours

      some things are translated in a way that makes the meaning slightly different but good enough most of the time.

      believe it or not fansubs are usually much better ime.

        • tithonis [she/her]@hexbear.net
          2 hours

          It’s the difference between doing something for work and doing something for love. I’m translating on my own time for fun. If I had to do it for a living, with the constraints that entails, I’d be churning out a lot more dreck.

    • FireWire400@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9 hours

      Unrelated but one thing that infuriates me to no end it that even though most German TV personalities speak English badly (like sub-middle-school badly), they always get perfect subtitles reflecting what they meant to say, but not what they did say.

    • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9 hours

      Hell the English subtitles to most things are fucking terrible, which I don’t understand because they literally have the fucking script and it’s just a matter of syncing it to the audio of the dialogue but noooooo spelling and consistency errors abound

    • LeapSecond@lemmy.zip
      11 hours

      Strangely enough they’re usually well made. There are cases where things are translated slightly differentely than you’d expect to get closer to the original meaning in the other language or to save space (cause this is also often a problem). But these differences are interesting in themselves, like you see a different interpretation. In the rare case where it’s really bad you can tell without knowing the spoken language.

    • Diddlydee@feddit.ukEnglish
      9 hours

      Even English ones are terrible sometimes, particularly with regional accents. Jamie Dornan was on something I watched and the subs kept showing Puttanesca (the pasta dish) as Put in NASCAR. I tend to keep Spanish subs on to keep up with my Spanish, and they’re generally correct in most places.

    • VonReposti@feddit.dk
      11 hours

      I hate Danish subtitles on English content. Not because they’re inherently bad but because it is extremely distracting. English on English is fine but only if it is word for word what they say, otherwise I turn it off and just pay more attention.

      Thing is, jokes cannot be translated easily, meanings change, and so on. That makes it so that the translated version isn’t carrying the same punch as the original. And I simply don’t have the mental capacity to read Danish and listen to English simultaneously (or ignore the subtitles).

      And it’s like that in reverse too. I’ve been showing some Danish movies to a foreigner, obviously she needed English subs, which proved to be hard to cancel out for me.

    • Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      12 hours

      It varies a lot from movie to movie. Some are very well done, others not so much. Back in the old days they would go as far as pick a new name for a movie just to make some pun work properly when translated. Sometimes references are replaced for others that make more sense in the localized context.

      But in general these days the subtitles don’t get much attention and they often pick simple/literal translations for everything, while dubs often get a lot more work put on them but also tend to dumb down the content to simplify things for a wider audience.

      One English expression that often gets overlooked on Portuguese subtitles and I get really annoyed when I see is “it can’t be helped”. In Portuguese it feels like you’re talking about yourself in third person.

      And another, closer to your example, that I have seen used wrong at least two times before. “Screw you” being used in the movie with the meaning of “fuck you” and the subtitle translating it with the word used for tightening a screw.

      • LtDan@lemmy.zipEnglish
        10 hours

        And another, closer to your example, that I have seen used wrong at least two times before. “Screw you” being used in the movie with the meaning of “fuck you” and the subtitle translating it with the word used for tightening a screw.

        The same applies with Japanese subs from English audio, what happens is that there are word inconsistencies for a single term. There was an episode of the same TV show I was watching and they translated “Marine” (as in a US Marine) using 3 words alltogther interchangably throughout:

        • 米兵 (US Troops)
        • 兵士 (Soldier)
        • 海兵隊員 (Marine)

        Only out of those 3 is the correct word choice based on visual context (the PoW’s are in fact in the corps) but the subtitles lazily used 兵士 referring to them as if they’re in the army (which is a seperate branch) as the USMC is under the Dept. of the Navy.

        The characters were having a conversation about rescuing 2 marines who are PoW in Afghanistan, during the second half. When they brought up the topic during the first scene: the correct word (海兵隊員) is used, however later on the translation decides to alternate between 米兵 & 兵士.

        Like, USE ONLY ONE WORD! It’s confusing as hell to read, especially if it serves as a key part of the episode’s plot (it’s literally within the synopsis), it was from Lie To Me (Season 2, Episode 8).

    • MyButSmellsBat@feddit.org
      10 hours

      My native language is German and I never had a problem with it. But i think compared to Japanese the German language is fairly easy and German is also much more similar to English than Japanese. So not only Translating but also dubbing and subtitles are much easier to do.

      Maybe in your example the translators didn’t know it better or were underpaid. I also don’t know how well the dubbing and subbing to japanese are overall level is. In german the level is quite high… i was onlynoticing that movies were translated and not origially german when i was like 11-13. (That could also just mean that i was a stupid child, but i think it’s the combination between that and the good dubbing)

      About the different challenges between subtitles and dubbing i can recommend a Tom Scott video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU9sHwNKc2c