For example, whenever I watch an American movie with Japanese subtitles: the translation kind of sucks since there are words translated literally word by word making zero sense or lack of taking account of visual context from a scene. Depends on who translated the dialog, it could be that translators didn’t watch the movie or understand the context in specific scenes.

I recall watching Clear & Present Danger (Harrison Ford) with JP sub, there was a piece of dialog where the commander of a special forces unit gave the orders on planting explosives in which he ordered them to “cook it” basically implying on detonating the trigger but the subtitles translated this as 料理しろ which is incorrect when you account the scene’s context.

Whether you speak German, French, Spanish or etc. are the translated subtitles crap when it comes to movies where colloquialisms (slang), jokes (humor) or wordplay (puns) are thrown into the mix while listening to the original English dub? It’s because subtitles only convey a message but can miss nuances from spoken dialog via the source language.

  • Fushuan [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    11·
    1 day ago

    Luckily Spanish is generally pretty well subtitled and dubbed. My pet peeve issue is that oftentimes there’s only Latin Spanish, instead of Spain Spanish. You’d think that each Latin country would have it’s own dialect so having just Latin Spanish would be reductionist, but alas.

    It’s annoying when I want to script auto subtitle selection and I don’t properly account for Latin Spanish, sometimes it picks that and it’s horrible, almost like reading a different language.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      22 hours ago

      Luckily Spanish is generally pretty well subtitled and dubbed. My pet peeve issue is that oftentimes there’s only Latin Spanish, instead of Spain Spanish. You’d think that each Latin country would have it’s own dialect so having just Latin Spanish would be reductionist, but alas.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Spanish

      In any event, in the sphere of spoken language, the issue has become problematic since at least the 1950s when the commercial demands on movie dubbing studios working with Hollywood films began to call for the development of a Spanish whose pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical features would not be recognizable as belonging to any particular country (español latino or español neutro, “Latin American Spanish” or “Neutral Spanish”). This goal soon proved to be an elusive one: even if the results could, on occasion, approximate a universally intelligible form, at the same time the process prevented the transmission of a familiar, intimate, or everyday tone. Disney Pictures took an early interest in unified dubbing. Three Little Pigs was dubbed in Paris by Castilian and French-accented actors. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio were dubbed in Argentina under Luis César Amadori. Later Disney films were dubbed in Mexico under Edmundo Santos.[44] Nevertheless, its continued use has produced a degree of familiarization with a certain abstract phonetics throughout Spanish America. Dubbings made in Spain, are very particularly localized due to both the language politics of Francoist Spain and later assumptions by Spanish audiences. As Disney has re-issued its productions in newer media or to establish new copyrights, it has increased the number of dialectal versions. Sometimes this has backfired: parents who had watched The Little Mermaid with a pan-Hispanic dubbing disliked the re-dubbed Peninsular Spanish dubbing.[44]