Confused About Translators' Philosophy When They Create Subtitles And Dubbing For Movies
I cannot figure out why some translators change the meaning of characters' lines via the subtitles and the audio dubbing. Sometimes humor is removed. Sometimes they change the meaning of what the person said, and although these changes end up being inconsequential, the changes were still completely unnecessary.
I honestly can't figure out the rhyme or the reason as to why they do this. To the best of my knowledge, the translator could have created an accurate translation in the destination language that would fit on the screen (for subtitles) or could be said in the amount of time allotted (for dubbing), but yet they don't. Why are they taking these liberties?
Best Answer
Dubbing is easy. Dubs are supposed to use mouth movements as keys, so as to make it easier to follow. As such, delivery, meanings, and words change. TV Tropes calls it Lip Lock. Badly done dubs don't follow the lip movement, resulting in "Cat Talk" (Phrased used to describe older badly dubbed Kung Fu movies, where the characters move their lips longer than the dubbed words). TV Tropes call it Hong Kong Dub.
Straight subtitles or captions have less to contend with. They aren't constrained by lip movement like dubs, so the translations can be closer to the original meaning. The key word is meaning though. Purely mechanical translations, like you would get from google translate, would be pretty bad. Meaning is more important than the words used, as you are conveying a thought. Jokes are especially hard as sometimes they are regional or cultural in nature. Would a joke about how awful a brooklyn accent is be as funny to someone that has no idea what a brooklyn accent sounds like?
Recently some American movies have gotten bad subtitle translations in their foreign release.
Those of you who have seen Guardians of the Galaxy know that people like to put down Rocket by calling him a "weasel" or a "rodent." Unfortunately, the fact that these are insults was completely lost on those responsible for the translation, and therefore each time were replaced by "small raccoon" - a phase that's much more factual than mean.
Which comes to one of the biggest issues in translations. It's often Non-Native speakers (of one of the languages) that are translating it. Even bilingual people have a hard time translating from one language to the other, because meanings change.
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What are the possible translation strategies for dubbing?
The most common translation strategy in the dubbed and subtitled version is Exact Translation, which means that there is \u201cmeaning equivalent\u201d in high frequencies. On the other hand, the least common strategy in the dubbed version is \u201cDeletion\u201d while it is \u201cReplacement\u201d in the subtitled version.What is it called when a movie is translated?
Dubbing for Movie TranslationLip-sync dubbing or simply dubbing (also called voice-overs in other countries) is another way to do movie translations. It involves replacing the original or source audio track with recorded audio (dialogue) in another language.What is subtitle and dubbing?
With subtitles, the motion picture and sound track continue with the addition of a written translation of what is being said. With dubbing, the pictures are unaltered, but the sound track is mostly replaced by a translation spoken over the original dialogue by voice-over actors.How does movie translation work?
Dubbing is the procedure by which foreign-language films can be translated into the audience\xb4s language. A translated dialogue is added to the original movie and, through editing, this translation is carefully matched to the timing and lip movements of the cast in the movie.Translation versus interpreting: clearing up the confusion
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