Culture: More on translations

I was thinking about translations and how even people who are paid to translate mess it up as well. Way too often, when watching a movie or TV I'll glance down a the subtitles in Portuguese and see that they misunderstood the English expression or simply mistranslated.
Some things are understandable, like when the actor says it'll cost 20 bucks and they translate it to 25 bucks. It could be the actual script had $25.00 and the actor ad libbed $20.00 instead, and the translator used the original script.
Yet way too often I've seen real screwups where they write down the exact opposite of what the person said. Like the actor says "Don't kill him!" and it's written below "Kill him".
Sometimes I'll hear the actor say an interesting expression and I'll look down so I might learn something new in Portuguese. Sometimes I do, but sometimes the translator had no idea what the actor was talking about and they just make up their own lines.
It's so bad I'm thinking of starting a company to do translations for TV and film. My marketing campaign would basically involve finding mistakes in the other companies translations, hopefully embarassing the distribution company enough to hire us at a higher rate.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Shortest Sudoku solver in Python

Dot to Png

Seven Segment Display in Inkscape