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Subtitling is really hard even at the best of times, especially when working off only a script without seeing the program. (This is, incredibly, apparently common practice, because it's faster.) Not only do you need to translate faithfully, but you need to mercilessly crunch it down into a few words that will be understandable if flashes onto the screen for a few seconds.

There's a famous blooper in the Finnish translation of Star Wars where the phrase "Maybe it's another drill" is rendered as the type of drill that cuts holes (pora), not drill as in exercise (harjoitus).

https://archive.is/3Lyem/bcd9c7ef4efb3ff594bb5dba1d515dc0182...

The translation blooper that has stood out most to me is also from Finland. Once I was watching a DVD of The Royal Tenenbaums with Finnish subtitles. As a character points to a beaten-up old car and talks about the dents in it, the Finnish translation repeatedly shows hammaslääkari, ‘dentist’.

It's not just subtitles. The german dubs of both Simpsons and Futurama are infamous for being extremely literal translations.

Pulp Fiction is probably also a good example for this.

The famous joke

>"Three tomatoes are walking down the street -- a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and squishes him... and says, 'Catch up.' "

Instead of "Catch up", they translated "Ketchup".

But as "Ketchup" doesn't sound like the German "Catch up", it sounded like an anti-joke.

I think the standard approach to this problem is that good translators come up with jokes that are similar in spirit even if they're not direct translations.

If I recall correctly, the works of Edgar Allen Poe are famous for having liberal but high quality translations in German. Song writers also sometimes do this when "translating" a song to another language.

Yeah this joke didn't make any sense in German. The problem I see with this kind of jokes is that they can't be translated to German.

e.g. another joke like this Did you hear about the country with the fastest growing capital? It's Ireland - every day it's Dublin.

I can't think of any way how to translate this joke so it would be funny in German. But I have a feeling that these word play jokes aren't used much in German speaking countries anyways. Most of the humor is about people acting different or surprising.

As a fellow German: I don't think puns are very popular in German (except for intentionally cheesy dad jokes).

The closest equivalent I can think of are sentences where the joke lies in using a different word at the end than the (likely, extremely crass) one the audience expects. These tend to work better in German than in English because of the sentence structure, I think.

EDIT: Example of a dad joke pun: "Was sagt ein Sachse auf dem Weihnachtsmarkt in New York? Ä Tännschen, please." -- "What does a man from Saxony say at the Christmas market in New York? A fir, please."

The joke is that "ein Tännchen", "a (small) fir", when pronounced with a Saxony accent, sounds a bit like the English word "attention". The joke works because most Germans know the phrase "attention, please" from movies, vacations and/or multilingual announcements. I believe this particular joke was invented some time in the 60s or 70s and ceased being funny about two seconds after, but that wouldn't stop "your dad" from using it.

I think this is pretty universal between languages that puns and double meanings are hard or impossible to translate.

Reading Nietzsche translations recently, German does seem to have a considerable capacity for allusion and double meanings that are very hard to translate. Perhaps not in modern or common usage, or nearly as much as English.

Yes it does - but it's not as prevalent in humor as it is in the US.

I'd say that most of these double meanings are hard to translate. At least if you compare German and English (the two languages I am "proficient" in). If you want this in a more modern context I would be completely unable to translate Dendemann lyrics to English so it would still be lyrical or funny.

At least they are done by humans...

The English word wear can mean (among other things) something that you have on you or that something is worn down from usage.

Guess which interpretation google used in the play store when translating Google Wear to Swedish?

Automated translations in UI:s, just don't. You will without question make a fool out of yourself and seem incompetent.

In fairness to subtitlers (and speaking as a translator myself, though in a much more forgiving field), they have one of the hardest jobs in our profession. The range of topics is infinite, the required vocabulary is also infinite, there's no repetition between jobs, there's hardly any context clues, the turnarounds are fast, the pay sucks, and their work will be scrutinized over and over for all eternity by fans (who never pay attention to all the lines that are done well).

In a perfect world it's easy to see how a team of two experienced translators could work on a movie for a few weeks and get it just so, but in the world we live in it's a small miracle that any of it ever gets done right. Hats off to them.

As a fellow translator, I disagree on the difficulty or low pay of doing subtitles. I get paid the same rate for subtitles that I would on any other text, but I can also bill the client for the time spent watching the video first. Turnarounds are not so fast; I often work pretty leisurely. Granted, what I normally translate are films, not television, which might be more stressful.

The people I really feel sorry for are the workers on either end of me: the transcriber, and then the person who takes my translated text and has to sync it up with the film. Both of those strikes me as more monotonous and tiresome than my own role.

>As a fellow translator, I disagree on the difficulty or low pay of doing subtitles. I get paid the same rate for subtitles that I would on any other text, but I can also bill the client for the time spent watching the video first. Turnarounds are not so fast; I often work pretty leisurely.

That's not the case in many parts of the world...

> Most of the mistakes I see seem to stem from the fact that the translator didn't understand the original content. I assume they are an individual Japanese native speaker, or a team with no English native speakers.

I'd rather assume that people are doing the translation without having seen the film at all. I've noticed that by watching wrong translations that don't come from cultural misunderstandings, but plainly not matching what is seen on the screen (maybe by using the wrong gender of people, or misidentifying who's doing the talking, or having words with two meanings using the one which doesn't match the current scene at all).

The economics of subtitle translation (either commercial or fan-made) favor uploading as many films or episodes as soon as possible, so it's likely that some people are just downloading the original text dump, run it through an automated translator, and editing it by hand to make it sound natural. I assume people who get regular commissions from established platforms will behave a bit better, but sometimes it still makes you wonder...

Oh, I think you cannot watch a single movie or show in my country without encountering some translation errors. Idioms seem to be the most common source of mistakes, together with some missed cultural references and misunderstood slang. I guess you get what you pay for. I remember about 20 years back when I was studying for my MS in astrophysics we got a call from the translator who wanted to make sure that he got some trivial thing right. As you can tell I was so impressed with his attitude to remember that two decades later. That makes it even more baffling today, when translators do not even try despite having Google and Wikipedia always available.

The problem is that doing research on Google and Wikipedia takes time, and your client is only paying you so much money. I think that the translators who are most likely to get obscure idioms or references right are those who are fortunate to be married to a bookish speaker of the source language, who can very quickly advise on these issues without the translator having to go off on a long search of the web.

As a German who sometimes watches German dubs, one mistranslation from English I notice very frequently is "eventually" becoming "eventuell" ("possibly").

The pair is one of the most well-known "false friends" between the two languages, but somehow translators sometimes still get them wrong from time to time. The last time I noticed it was in a Star Trek TNG episode where the monologue didn't make any sense because of it. I constantly second-guess the translation when hearing the word.

It tends to be even worse in the opposite direction. I speak and understand Japanese, and have seen many Japanese movies with French subtitles in my home country, and while I understand Japanese, I have this problem that my eyes just want to go and read those subtitles I don't need[1].

Anyways, I don't have exact examples in mind, but one that stood out (and again, I don't remember the exact details), was the subtitles saying the exact opposite of what they were actually saying.

1. it's ridiculous, and it also happens in the opposite direction, when I end up reading the Japanese subtitles to Hollywood movies.

I tend to turn on subtitles when they're available, because I wouldn't understand all the speech in a film, unless the film only features middle-class characters speaking standard British English, which, to be honest, might make a rather boring film... Even a British film needs some Glaswegian psychos...

It's interesting to see how much the subtitles diverge from what's spoken. Sometimes you can see they've apparently just simplified it a bit, not losing anything important, but sometimes the differences seem gratuitous, or somewhat creative. Do the subtitles come from the original script, perhaps, while the lines were adapted by the actors on set without anyone updating the (tran)script?

Hmmm. I have been a pirate all my life.

The subs either work or don't (e.g. machine translated garbage).

A handful of times there's a discrepancy e.g. T2 Trainspotting.

This is "official" subs from BluRay or Itunes.

I have roughly the same experience with subtitled shows on discovery channel (back in the day when it was still good) where they'd manage to mistranslate numbers with alarming frequency.

If you want to see really bad subtitles of Japanese media try watching anything on Crunchyroll. Their subs are all written in <24 hours by people working off a script dump without actually seeing the show for really bad pay. Netflix is amazingly high quality in comparison.

The translator's job is particularly difficult when they are meant to translate something that is misinterpreted in the original culture. A comment about this would seem political.

For example, in this transcript:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-tran...

It clearly says "When you're famous, women [you don't have a relationship with] will consent to [aggressively] grabbing their vagina". I added the brackets based on the context, but I didn't add the word consent: in the original the word consent is the word "let". A perfect synonymn. If you say "I let him do that" in the past means exactly "I consented to his doing that." It's the exsct meaning.

(We know that "they" refers to the women and not the media (i.e. they'll let you means the women will consent, not, the media will let you get away with it) because immediately before, Trump set the topic of what women will and won't consent to.)

Immediately before, he mentioned how he was rejected:

"I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it."

(After a followup)

"I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. "

This is hard to translate and must be done with care. As a translator I would look at some of the context, the whole context. This is as follows:

    Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

    Unknown: Whoa.

    Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married.

    Unknown: That’s huge news.

    Trump: No, no, Nancy. No, this was [unintelligible] — and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.

    She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture —

    I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married.

---

I would be 80% confident that the correct translation is: "I made an advance on her, but she rejected me and I stopped." (It is hard for me to know what "moved on her like a bitch" means. I am puzzled.)

But the parts I have given clear, unambiguous black and white translations for is that, in the context of being famous, usually women will consent to very aggressive sexual advances.

That's the meaning of the words.

Not the meaning of the words: "You should just grab women by the vagina without asking."

The English-language culture (on both sides of the aisle) is not used to interpreting someone.

So to bring things full circle, I would translate the excerpt:

    And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

    (Man) Whatever you want.

    Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

--

"Even grab them intimately, they will allow even that."

----

That is the correct translation, because the translator's loyalty is to the speaker, not to the media, politics, etc.

You're definitely demonstrating why translation is hard.

"Let" is definitely not a perfect synonym for consent. It often means, "not prevent or forbid."

Consent is always active, not passive - permission is given.

So let's jump into a possible pussy grabbing scenario. Someone could be shocked in the moment and not physically stop the pussy grabbing. And then after, they might not run screaming to the police, because it's his word vs hers and he is a very powerful man. Technically, she "let" him to do it, in that she didn't prevent it. But it's certainly not consent.

That is simply not the meaning of the word "let" in this context.

Just to let you know I know what you mean, here's an expression using "let" in both senses:

1. How could you let him do that?

2. I didn't "let" him do that. How was I supposed to know he would do that? He never asked me.

Here 1 uses your meaning and 2 uses mine. Donald Trump's transcript uses 2, not 1. (Another usage of 1 is whenever someone says 'how could you let this happen'? That never means allow.)

Another example is one someone says: "I can't believe I let this happen." They don't mean "allow" then. However, in Trump's transcript he means the allow meaning.

You can be quite certain, because he set the context clearly.

Basically, quoting "grab them by the pussy" is leaving out the meaning as uttered.

It's a nice scary quote. As a translator you have to kind of mistranslate it so it is shocking but also grammatically kind of still matches the imperative.

But that's not what was said.

We're going to have to seriously disagree here. The people who have accused him of sexual assault (their stories written down before the video came out) described the experience in the way I defined it. Trump shocking them by kissing them in the mouth out of nowhere, grabbing them, etc.

The people you quote would say "no" to the question "Did you let Trump do that?" (No.)

Knowing that women don't let him do that might might be a good reason to put words in Trump's mouth and remove "they'll let you" from his sentence, but it is not a faithful translation.

What he said was that they let you do that. It's not true that the women let him do that, but that's what was uttered. As a translator, you don't get to change what someone said, to instead match the truth that you learn from somewhere else.

For an example, a famous lie is that Nixon said "I am not a crook." We know he was a criminal who resigned due to his criminal activities. So can I change that line from "I am not a crook" to, "Nixon called himself a crook"? After all the reason for his statement or the use of the word crook was the fact that he was a crook, and making a public address on this subject.

Of course not. And likewise it's wrong to change "they let you grab 'em by the pussy" to "grab 'em by the pussy" by misquoting the sentence. It's there in black and white, you just have to read it.

If you say "I let him do that" in the past means exactly "I consented to his doing that."

I disagree. "Letting" someone do something is a passive affirmation at best, and could also be out of fear for consequences. "Consenting" is active affirmation.