We’ve all seen products or at least pictures of products from other countries where the English translations of descriptions or instructions just makes you shake your head.
One of the most well known examples became an internet meme. All Your Base Are Belong to Us
I was just wondering if there are examples of translations going horribly wrong in the other direction and I know we have some Dopers across the seas fluent in other languages.
This might not be what you’re looking for, but the guys adding subtitles to American movies for foreign distribution sometimes fuck up in idiotic/hilarious ways.
Take Sweden, where I grew up.
There’s a scene in Twin Peaks where one guy tells another “Laura was a pretty wild girl” (or something to that effect), and the other shoots back “tell me about it!”, as if to say “well duh Mr. Obvious, I knew that already.” Well, the subtitle guy obviously didn’t catch the intended meaning here, subtitling the second line with something like “would you please expand on that?”
Or take Apocalypse Now. Remember that scene where a guy goes “that acid I talked about? I just dropped it!” and then starts hallucinating while watching all these beautiful explosions? Well, the subtitle guy (I like to think there’s only one) apparently thought “hmmmmm, lessee here… ‘dropped’ as in ‘drop to the floor’, right? Like, ‘displace’, ‘lose’ – something like that? OK, then! Another great day in the history of Swedish subtitling!”, making it sound as if the guy had lost his acid… Rendering the following hallucinations pretty damn incomprehensible.
My favorite subtitle screwup in Spanish was in Deadwood, where they translated the name of Al Swearengen’s establishment as El Gimnasio (the Gymnasium). Now, I know some athletic activities went on there but that seemed like a might odd name for a brothel and saloon. It wasn’t until I saw a scene showing the sign over the door that I realized the translator had heard “The Gem” as “The Gym.”
Of course. The Quebec consumer magazine Protégez-Vous in fact has a column about strange or incomprehensible labels or user manuals, which are often bad translations from English (or some other language) into French.
Here’s a good one. “Wrinkle-free” has been rendered as “La ride libère,” which means “the wrinkle frees.” Or this one, in which the translator has confused MP (megapixels) with MP (member of Parliament) and translated it as “député” (the latter).
The best example I had ever heard of was a case in which “Golden Turkey Breasts” was rendered as “Seins dorés de la Turquie” (gilded [women’s] breasts from Turkey).
We bought a box of chocolates in Japan that proudly proclaimed “Different testes of different people!”
I remember one movie where the line “They even shot the dog!” was translated at “They even shut the door!” (in the Korean subtitle).
Korean subtitles have definitely improved, but in the past the awful translations were really distracting for me.
I once saw a TV movie about kids on an American farm. One of the adult characters complained about a troublemaker kid who helped out, never did anything but “raise Cain”. The Hebrew subtitles translated this as a kid who “only planted sugar cane”
missed the edit window…please re-read my post as :
I once saw a TV movie about kids on an American farm. One of the adult characters complained about a troublemaker kid who never helped out, never did anything but “raise Cain”. The Hebrew subtitles translated this as a kid who “only planted sugar cane”.
My Mom was just telling me the other day about an American movie laughably subtitled in Chinese. It was so bad it was like an early software program (Google or Babelfish would be better). For example:
“Are you kidding?” => <is your name “Kidding”?>
“Don’t you understand?” => <you don’t stand beneath?>
That last one didn’t even make sense in Chinese without an object to stand underneath!
Samuel R. Delany told the tales of one of his novels where the character rubbed depilatory cream on his face, then wiped it off a few pages later. When translated into French, the translator wrote the the character rubbed shaving cream on his face, then wiped it off.
However, the bigger mistake was in his novel Nova. It’s a retelling of the search for the Holy Grail, and one character remarks on this, and indicates that everyone who told the story of the Grail died immediately afterwards. And that the only way to survive would be to end the story without completing the final
The French translator completed the final sentence.
He died.
Oh, and the translation into Is your name “Kidding?” was complete with the English letters spelled out for the supposed name. (In pinyin, which I’m not really familiar with, I suppose it’d be ni jiao “Kidding” ma?, with Chinese characters except for the word “Kidding”.) Which makes it even more surreal.
One of the funniest was a bilingual label on some clothing item (I forget what). In English it said, “Made in Turkey”. The French said “Faite en Dinde”. Well dinde is the French word for the bird and D’inde means from India, but the name of he country is Turquie.
It is interesting to speculate why the bird of new world origin was called a turkey bird in English and an Indian bird in French.
When I was in Tibet I saw some locals watching Bruce Almighty, which had been translated into Chinese, then that had been dubbed into Tibetan, with Chinese subtitles that had been re-translated into English - both languages were represented, taking up about 1/3 of the bottom of the screen.
At one point Morgan Freeman looked at Jim Carrey and according to the English subtitles said:
Shall we fuck?
Goodness knows what the Tibetans thought the movie was about.
Just remembered another one (possibly apocryphal). Apparently the Chinese title of The Sixth Sense was translated as:
He’s a ghost!
I hadn’t considered movie subtitles when I started this, but these are certainly are perfect examples.
Thanks!
I admit I did not see this myself but my Aunt related this to me. She said she was in France watching an American war movie with French subtitles. At one point a soldier sticks his head out of a foxhole, sees Panzers coming his way and shouts, “Tanks! Tanks!”
The subtitles read, “Merci! Merci!”
A friend of mine picked up a bunch of pirated movies for a dollar in Malaysia. Most of the English subtitles are hilarious. The ones for Brokeback Mountain, for instance, decided that Ennis’s name is Europe, so people keep calling out for Europe all the time. Besides that, none of them actually form coherent English sentences - it’s basically just a mishmash of seemingly random English words that make no sense when put together, or, if you can actually make a sentence out of them, the sentence is grammatical but completely meaningless semantically.
Some of the other movies he has do actually have subtitles in perfect English…but they belong to a completely different movie (I don’t remember the actual movies involved, but it would be like watching Chocolat while reading the script for* Star Wars*.) The end credits on one of them are also for a totally different movie.
Indeed they do. I love watching movies/TV shows in English with Indonesian subtitles. Quite often the subtitles are completely wrong, but if you speak both languages you can see just where the error crept in. My favorite example comes from the TV show “Numbers.” In English, the dialogue goes something like this:
BRILLIANT NERDY GUY: This criminal is really smart!
OTHER PERSON: Yeah…your kind of smart.
Meaning that the criminal has the same kind of intelligence that the nerdy guy has, so the nerdy guy should be able to figure out the criminal’s next move, and the good guys will be able to catch him.
The subtitles renders this as the equivalent of:
BRILLIANT NERDY GUY: This criminal is really smart!
OTHER PERSON: Well, you are sort of smart.
It’s easy to see how that mistranslation could occur, because to get the true meaning you have to understand that “your” is a possessive, not a contraction for “you are”. You also need to see that in this case “kind of” means “type of”, not “more or less.”
Sometimes the translations are so wrong that you wonder: what did the translator think this show was about, anyway? And how the heck do viewers who rely on the subtitles figure out what is really going on?
They must all think that America is a very strange place, full of nonsensical plot twists and non sequiturs.
I’ve noticed that even the English-to-English closed captioning on DVDs is sometimes off. I don’t mean minor changes to make the captions shorter or easier to follow, but mistakes that significantly change the meaning of the dialogue.
In the UK film Bend it Like Beckham, there’s a scene where the heroine and her football (soccer) coach almost kiss at a post-game party, but are interrupted. She later goes to him and says something like “About what happened last night…”
He replies “Don’t worry, I’ve already forgotten about it.” As in, this incident we both find embarrassing might as well have never happened, let’s not talk about it. But in the captions, he says “Don’t worry, I’ve already forgotten about us,” which strikes me as a pretty big difference! That wording implies that they had some kind of real relationship, it’s over, and he’s put it behind him.
