Humor

Translating Film Subtitles 1

By Anastasia ⋅ December 10, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

One of the few bright spots in Chris Weitz’s screenplay for the Golden Compass were the lines spoken by the villainous Tatars. Just before the final battle begins, Lyra walks up to the line of armed men with their daemon wolves and spits. The ringleader answers by saying to another man, “Дай волчонку полакомиться.” “Set your wolf on that child,” go the subtitles and that’s probably what Weitz wrote for someone to translate. The actual Russian: “Treat your cub to a snack.”

Business as usual in Hollywood is to render dialogue into dismal Russian the likes of which would be never uttered by a native speaker. I bet if you compared the actual Russian spoken in most American movies to machine translations, the machines might win. Then again, maybe the comparison is nonsensical. Maybe the machines have been doing the translations all along–what, with the studios skimping on paying the writers at every turn and now with the strike. You don’t have to go farther than the last season’s Heroes Odessa storyline to see what I mean (though I reserve the right to blog at length about this in the future). In any case, after years of twitching in my theater seat, when I heard Weitz’s Tatars, I was thrilled. That moment made the movie for me almost worth the price of admission.

But how evil the Russian Empire is in the story. In our world, Tatar is still a living language. In The Golden Compass, not even a trace remains. Between themselves, the Tatars speak only Russian.

Lest you think the problem is at its worst on this side of the Atlantic, here’s a site [ru] I’ve unearthed recently about the glitches of English going into Russian. One poster talks about the movie Fangs and the way the name of its town of Scottsville has been merely transliterated rather than translated into Russian. Ergo, instead of something like Scottish-Town, we are offered the city of Скотсвил–or Swineville.

Another user points out [ru] how thoroughly the trailer for Sweeney Todd has been–pardon the pun–butchered on one of his DVDs. “How about a shave?” becomes “Not bad for a name.” The translators came up completely short when they heard “about him” come out of Helena Boheme Carter’s mouth: the best they could do was turn the phrase into a proper name, Bakhim.

Bakhim, Google tells me, is a company based in Ufa, which, of course, is a city with a population roughly a quarter Tatar….