As James Thurber once told a (native English-speaking) woman who said she preferred reading his works in French translation: “I suppose they do lose something in the original.”
That’s true of a lot of literature. The meanings of words can (and do) change over time—so much so that you need a reference work to really understand Shakespeare, even though he wrote in Early Modern English (as opposed to Chaucer and his Middle English, which is essentially another language).
The use of slang can definitely age a text. The question is whether its appropriate to the period, and will it be understood by the reader?
Some words simply don’t endure and vanish altogether from the language. For instance, how many people reading this post could say what swyve once meant?
On the other hand, slang can sometimes be understood simply from context. A classic example of this is Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange, though knowing a bit of Russian helps too. I wonder how many readers realize the name is derived from a suffix denoting ''teens."
The most egregious example of a terrible translation I remember was from the French dub of an episode of the Young and the Restless.
One of the characters was in prison for some reason and his friends were trying to find a way to get him out. It seemed difficult and one them said something to effect of (paraphrasing from memory) Ce n’est pas comme si on pouvait lui envoyer un gâteau avec un dossier caché à l’intérieur. “It’s not like we could send him a cake with a hidden file inside.”
I’m pretty sure went “Huh, what? … Oh… Oh no, no, no you don’t!”
Whoever translated this was unaware that there are two words in French for the word file in English.
The tool is une lime. Un dossier is a folder.
A bunch of papers wouldn’t have been much help in that situation, indeed.
My wife and I have watched a lot of dubbed and subtitled Netflix shows. We’ve wondered why the dub is often so different than the subtitle. Farming out to different studios is one, very plausible explanation that may be right.
But I’ve also noticed that dubbing has gotten very good at matching the lip movements of the characters these days. So I have a theory that the dub translators choose words that convey the general meaning but better fit the lip movements, while subtitle translators do a more verbatim version. This seems to be borne out when characters talk outside the frame or with their back to the camera— the dub and subtitle very often (but not always) match exactly in that case.
I remember watching SF-flick “Enemy mine” on Croatian TV. Instead of conveying the meaning of “My Enemy” they translated it as “Enemy Mineshaft”.
But to be fair, translators usually do a good job here.
That’s not a mistranslation, that’s a brilliant translation. It conveys the same basic meaning (the guy not driving has seen a thing in the way and says so) but it’s funnier and spot on.
When I’m reading subtitles in a movie, I’m not looking for a scholarly translation of the text. I want to understand what’s happening, and what the actors are conveying to each other, and i want to enjoy the movie.
However funny it may be, it’s clear the translators misheard the word “shed,” which is quite common when dealing with people who don’t know English well.
When I was teaching English as a Foreign Language, I had to explain the difference between a Russian bufet (snack bar) and a “buffet” where you have a wide choice of food (which is rendered as au fourchette). When I asked one of my students (who happened to be from China) to tell me about a recent business trip, he said “The food in my hotel was fo’ shit.”
(On another occasion, he also said “Businessmen from the south of China are the most sexful.”)
I’m not at all sure that’s true. Especially if the building was an outhouse.
In the second Rambo movie, Trautman argues with Murdock about the need to recover POWs clandestinely. When it was shown on Russian TV, the line “We promised reparations to the Vietnamese and then reneged” was changed to “The armed forces don’t have the money to mount an operation right now.”