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Video subtitling

By karin förster handley; Published 08/2/2004;

Almost every bilingual person feels distracted by the subtitles on the screen. I, for one, usually feel the translator misunderstood a phrase, (or is evidently not fluent in both languages). In the event of subtitling videos with Spanish audio into English, there is an additional difficulty: Spanish will take up more words or characters, while the English version may prove to be too short, and in the end the scene seems to lack the necessary text support.
There are a number of things to be taken into account, which might contribute to attaining better results:
- maximum number of characters allowed is usually 36 or thereabouts. Here, Spanish audio into English subtitles may prove too short. Try playing the scene again, to find if you can better wrap the implied meaning into the lines translated. English into Spanish subtitles will present the difficulty of the lines resulting too long. Do not waste time trying to shorten them immediately. I find it easier to make adjustments at the end of each scene, as I read the lines over and over and watch the sequence to grasp the meaning of it all.
- scene subtitles need to follow the thread of action shown. You may need to re-think and re-word the subtitle until it fits perfectly into the sequence.
- subtitles in advance look awful. Avoid filling up empty spaces with subtitles corresponding to the following scene. If in doubt, it is better to leave the subtitle for a few more seconds, instead of spoiling anticipation.
- Should slang be translated? This will depend on what the producer/subtitling company prefers. Some of them reject the "Slang for Slang idea". This allows the translator to offer a free version of what the phrase or word means, always honoring the original meaning, of course. If, however, you are asked to use "slang for slang", then you may make use of localized dictionaries offering equivalents for slang expressions.
- The same goes for idioms, sayings, etc. Google the idiom or make a wild guess and then google your guess. There's a good chance you'll come up with an equivalent.
In my view, subtitling deserves a category of its own within translation. Here, academicism will not do, and it is more a question of sensing the environment and setting, to come up with audience-friendly, colloquial, apt equivalents to the original audio.
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Subtitling - basic principles

By Cristiana Coblis; Published 08/22/2004;

There are a number of technical requirements that must be obeyed and then, there are specific difficulties that come with subtitlia, the language of subtitling.
A few basic principles to subtitling or screen translation:
Translate everything
Translate even on-screen text, such as names of institutions, road signs, billboards that stay on-screen and are significant to the plot. Also, names, titles, ranks or positions of speakers, etc.
Do not translate literally
The art of the subtitler is to understand the plot and what is being said in the original content and translate it as faithfully and accurately as possible. Do not be faithful to the letter of the text, but to the sense of the content. This is not nearly as easy as it sounds, in subtitles you only have a limited number of characters per subtitles (usually 36-40 characters), hence the subtitler must have a good knowledge in the art of summarizing.
Summarize
The subtitler should give the most concise and accurate translation and interpretation (adaptation) of the original text into the target language in the fewest number of words possible. The subtitler should know and decide what to render to the public in order to carry out and insure understanding of the plot and of the main points. In translation from English into a Latin language (such as Romanian) you will have on your hands a short English text that translates into a many long words, so you’ll have to decide what to retain and what is in fact superfluous. It is ok to leave out some content as long as it will not prove particularly important or relevant to the plot later on.
Puns, play on words, proverbs – adapt, replace, recreate
It is always difficult to translate jokes that are hilarious in English, but mean nothing into your language. The same with puns or proverbs. In this case, be creative, find something similar into your language that will render the original sense and contribute to understanding the message and the plot. If you are lucky to have a similar saying in your language, good for you. If not, adapt it or replace it completely.
Language used, from specialized to slang
If you are translating ER, make sure you use good specialized dictionaries and research your every word. If you are translating slang, make sure you use words that are in the dictionaries. Also, you should decide what is the corresponding level of slang into your language. The variety of levels you will encounter in subtitling is truly wide, you have to be prepared to handle any register of language, from academic, highly specialized to slang.
Consistency
There should be consistency throughout the entire translation, especially in such points as: numbers, measurements, names, nicknames (spelling, translation of names, etc), addresses, formal or informal level of address, acronyms, etc.
Punctuation
Every language has its own subtitlia. You will notice that by simply turning on the TV and reading some subtitles. The language rules (punctuation, especially) is not the classic one that you will find in every grammar book, but a specific one. Find out what the subtitlia rules are for your language and use it consistently.
Using italics
Some consider italics are not necessary, but usually subtitles use italics for: off-camera speech, text being read, the TV, the radio, songs, book or movie titles, and foreign words.
Measurements
Translation absolutely required from the imperial system into the metric system (unless of course you use the imperial system of measurements). The subtitler has to decide if there is need for precision to the very millimetre, or if the number in the original English text is just an approximation and should be rendered in the target language as an approximation.
Line division
Line division is particularly important to how subtitles look on screen and most particularly the speed of reading and comprehension. If the text fits on one line, keep it on one line, the viewer will be happy to see more of the screen. If the text does not fit on one line, then you should try to divide it as best as possible, keeping in mind the following basic principles:
1. Divide at punctuation marks (“,”, “.”, “:”, “…”)
2. BEFORE conjunctions (i.e. you should have the conjunction on the second line: and, or, because, etc.)
3. BEFORE prepositions (i.e. you should always move the preposition on the second line, ex: on, for, in, inside, on the outside of, etc.) Watch out for compound prepositions.
4. DO NOT SEPARATE a noun from its article (i.e. do not leave the article “a”, “an”, “the” on the first line and the noun on the second line).
5. NO DOT DIVIDE a name, whenever possible and whenever you have plenty of space the keep it together.
6. NO NOT DIVIDE compound or reflexive verbs (i.e. do not leave the auxiliary, reflexive, negative particle etc on the first line and main verb on the second line.)
7. NO NOT DIVIDE verbal phrases, idioms, expressions
8. Do not split abbreviations
9. Try not to divide the subject from the verb whenever the space allows it.
10. DO NOT LEAVE ONE WORD on a line even if it is followed by punctuation.
The basic principle to line division is to keep idea units and semantic units together; it will insure easier and faster reading and comprehension by the viewer.
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THE CREATIVE WORLD OF SPANISH SUBTITLES

By John Pint | Published 09/3/2006

If film makers only knew what their movies say
once they cross the border...

©2006, John J. Pint
All rights reserved

I live in Mexico and often rent videos. Most of these have the original sound track in English, with Spanish subtitles. As my Spanish has been improving over the years, I've discovered that sometimes the subtitles are more entertaining than the film.
For example, here's a line from Body Chemistry II: "I dreamed I was in bed with you." That's what was spoken from the screen, but what countless Spanish speakers saw in the subtitle was "Soñé que estaba en Beverly Hills," which means "I dreamed I was in Beverly Hills." To say the least, something got lost in the translation.
Highly inventive subtitles like this one are typical of what non-English speakers occasionally encounter while viewing most of the films that come their way. But how do translators make such enormous blunders in the first place?
A glance at a few similar mistranslations may shed light on this question. In the movie Sliver, "Carly, you're wrong!" comes out "Carly, Don't run!" In Missing, "a scuba-diving course" became "a course on Cuba" and in Princes in Exile, "We started out butting heads" is turned into: "We started out with butterheads."
These three examples suggest, first, that the translator's knowledge of English isn't exactly top-notch and, second, that the translator does not have access to a written script and is entirely depending on his or her ear. This might help us understand why “He’s a bachelor” was heard as “He’s an amateur” by the translator of House of the Spirits, but how a simple phrase like "Come on over!" could be bizarrely transmogrified into "Come, Elver!" (in the film Stranded) is more difficult to explain.
Now, sometimes the translator gets the English right, word for word, but can't make heads or tails out of it. The expression may be a technical, historical or religious allusion or just "teen talk" and unlikely to be found in the dictionary. In an episode of Smallville, for example, Clark tells Lana, “I’m going to buy you a looking glass,” but the translator has a very hazy idea of what this is and our hero ends up promising to buy the girl “a magnifying glass” instead. In the film Don Juan de Marcos, the translator misses the religious connotations in "It was like the Garden after the Fall" and turns it into "the garden after the autumn." In White Wolves, a hungry hiker opens her knapsack, digs inside and says, "Who took my Power Bars?" The translator, obviously not a big candy bar fan, valiantly tries to make sense out of this cryptic question and has the girl say, "Who took my emergency lights?" Unfortunately, those Power Bars come back into the story several times and eventually get eaten up, leaving much of the Spanish speaking world wondering when those wonderful edible flashlights will appear at the hardware stores in their country.
Such heroic attempts to turn a cryptic expression into words that somehow relate to the film are rare indeed. Most of the time, the so-called translation is conjured up the way Dagwood sandwiches are made, by anxiously grabbing whatever comes to hand first. For example, the trailer for Born to be Wild says the upcoming film will be brought to us by "Warner Brothers Spanley Entertainment." Warner probably has no idea their film was translated by someone who couldn't recognize the word "Family," but at least they can be proud they got a translator with a really wild imagination. Perhaps it was this same creative soul who turned the epic film Alexander into a surreal comedy. Throughout the movie Heracles is referred to as Hercules, Thebes is translated as “thieves” and The Queen of a Thousand Roses is turned into “The Queen of 1000 Trousers.”
Before feeling sorry for the readers of these Spanish subtitles, consider what you might have been reading the last time you watched a foreign flick. Wim Wenders' Far Away, So Close contains dialogue in German, French, Italian and English. Every time the German came up, I was entirely at the mercy of the subtitles. When English was spoken, however, I had a chance to judge the translator's abilities. A woman walks up to a guitarist who had performed in public a bit earlier in the film and tells him, "I saw your concept."
Of course, foreign-film dialogue is expected to sound a bit odd, but it would be nice if it had something to do with the movie.
Next, we come to the high point of creativity in subtitling. Bored with simply replacing English with Spanish, the translator tries his or her hand at scriptwriting and attempts to improve the movie. For example, in The Witches of Salem, a truly pitiless judge condemns the accused to jail and stipulates a daily diet of “three drops of water and three morsels of bread…that’s all.” However, the milk of human kindness obviously flows through the translator’s veins and the subtitles announce that the prisoner is going to receive nothing less than “three jars of water and three loaves of bread” per day.
Of course, if there’s a high point, there must also be a low point and that’s when the translator doesn't just get it wrong, but manages to come up with the exact opposite of what was said. Such a scenario occurs in Loving Lulu when the question is asked, "Would you like to share this with me?" In English, the answer is an enthusiastic, "You're on!" The translator, however, apparently had never come across such an obscure expression and turned it into "(Olvídalo!" in Spanish, which means, "Forget it!"
When it comes to getting things dead wrong, though, no one could outdo the translator of a better-forgotten sci-fi flop called Dead Space, in which the ship's robot announces "Defense shields are up!" while the subtitle reads "Defense shields are down!"
What could film producers do to ensure that their painstakingly crafted masterpieces remain somewhat intelligible to millions of moviegoers around the world? They might insist that translation agencies start practicing quality control and undergo frequent spot checks by independent sources. They might also insist that subtitle translators work in bilingual pairs, one member being a native speaker of Spanish educated in a Spanish-speaking country and the other an English speaker educated in an English-speaking country. My wife and I fall into these categories and we've discovered that working together really pays off. Besides, four eyes spot far more mistakes than two.
If such practices are followed, Steven Spielberg may fare better than Bill Clinton did when his reelection victory speech was broadcast all over Latin America... translated into Spanish, of course. Here's what the humorist Navarrete had to say about Clinton's speech, in the highly acclaimed newspaper Siglo 21:

"If that translator was doing a good job, we may be assured that the president of the most ostentatious country on this planet is dyslexic, tongue-tied and spaced out, and on top of that, demonstrates unmistakable signs of being mentally retarded."

John J. Pint
www.ranchopint.com
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