Films and TV shows and more often have subtitles, which are helpful for enjoying muted video, translation, people with hearing impairment, people struggling to understand accents, checking fast unclear dialogue and other reasons. They are important, and sometimes it’s clear when they do something right or wrong.
Maybe we can’t expect them all to be works of art, but there are certainly some easy wins even in the industrial media environment. What do you think?
I love when translators add cultural explanations in fan subs of animes.
This is not an example of that:
Oh, and for some stupid reason professional subs never translate the theme song. Fan subs do that. I used to have a version of Evangelion where it would alternate between the translation and Japanese lyrics in roman letters, that was nice.
One trend which annoys me is having meaningful non-English simply listed as ‘[speaking language]’
Even worse is when, despite being another language, a common word (whether homophonic or loan words) would by understood regardless, just isn’t present in the captions.
The version of this I hate is when a program has built in hard sub translation for foreign language sections, which get covered up by the soft subs only saying “< speaking [language] >”. So now my deaf ass can understand one language or the other, but not both without toggling captions on and off constantly.
An interesting example I saw was in Archer. During an agitated rant, Archer finally interjects demanding someone answer the phone. The next shot is a plain still shot of the telephone, which the captions helpfully emphasise [PHONE NOT RINGING]; a recurring joke is Archer’s constant ear-ringing due to careless gun use.
Having seen other, more careless translations, I can easily see jokes (or in other contexts, important clues) like this being missed and it made me think about how film techniques can imply audio silently. If there’s a plain shot of a phone, a hearing impaired person might reasonably assume it’s a visual implication that the phone is ringing.
What I like with UK subtitles, is that different characters get different colours. With translation subtitles this never seems to happen.
You should check out the BBC guidelines for subtitling. They are really good and include preserving the intent of the program, avoiding ambiguity, and not spoiling jokes with bad timing.
