Hello (Bonjour) from Your Friendly TV Translator

It's nice to see someone care about their work this much, and that he gets the time to do it well.

His point about the viewer not noticing the translation, if done well, and that it's easier if he cares about the story, highlight some of my main complaints about subtitles.

Denmark doesn't have a tradition for dubs, but with streaming it has become used more often, and subtitles don't always get the attention described in the article. Very frequently it's clear that the translator have a poor understanding of US culture, when translating subtitles to Danish. I suspect the reason could be price. When translating to English, it fine if it costs a bit more, the translation will be used by hundreds of million people. Danish, it will be used by at most 6 million people, assuming that the entire population watch the same movie. Realistically, at the most 1 million people will benefit from a translation.

I still see Danish subtitles that are clearly made by a Swede, who just happen to know enough Danish that you don't notice most of the time and as mentioned, subtitles translated by someone with limited knowledge of the culture of the country that created the movie.

The image at the top of this article is from Lupin, which indeed has excellent subtitles. There was one moment in the first episode though which stood out to me as almost a translator's flourish - it was just a beautiful subtitling choice.

An auctioneer responds to a bid at one point with, "if we'd started at this price, we would've saved some time."

Then he shrugs, and, in the original French dialogue, he says "Mais, enfin, c'est très bien," which basically means "But, in the end, it's fine".

The English subtitle the translator chose, though, is perfect. Their auctioneer says:

"But c'est la vie."

Knowing when you can get away with a subtitle like that must be the height of pleasure for a translator.

I saw some hilarious dubbing in Belarus a few years ago when I was there for work. I was browsing the local channels and came across an old classic feauring Jean Claude van Damme. In a particularly ridiculous scene, he clearly goes "Noooooooooooooooo!" in an overly dramatic way. This got correctly dubbed with a very brief "njet". Indifferent dubbing is common all over eastern Europe apparently. The same guy just reading out the lines. Male/female voices, it doesn't matter. Just working his way through the lines not caring about the content.

Thankfully, the Netherlands has no dubbed voices; only subtitles. As soon as I learned to read, I basically started picking up English from just passively reading what I just heard. It's a reason why English is so well understood in those parts of Europe that don't have dubbing. Even people without much education will be able to speak and understand it.

The subtitling/dubbing process as described is an art. It also requires sizable chunk of time for considering the choices and tweaks, just as any creative writing. If this art is also an income source, then the pay/time arithmetic becomes important. It would be nice, if production houses had these quality standards, as described, AND respective appreciation of these efforts (paywise too).

Alas, more and more the human creative output in such field as subtitling is being replaced by AI output. This also distorts expectations about the effort needed to produce a quality output.

Is it just cutting corners and "optimization" of the process? In my view it tells more about changing attitudes towards the language in general. Nuances and styles traded off for direct meaning, creative work overpowered by churn.

I guess, now this field needs the enthusiasm and love as described more than ever. Ironically, the AI too needs that quality for training but it cares less about the time well-spent consuming the final product.

As a former TV production assistant in the US, the headline made me think it was an article about the various over-the-air repeater stations that stations use to expand their signal reach. Thought that was mildly funny.