So there’s this older Japanese TV show that I’ve been watching on YouTube. Most of it is subtitled by individuals (it’s never been officially subbed). After the first 15 or so episodes, this particular account posts videos subbed by someone other than the ones who did the first 15, and the drop in quality is substantial. Half the time, I have to actually think about what the subtitle line is trying to say, and I don’t always succeed. I’m entirely unsure if I can continue because of this, even if I never find any other source for this series.
Anyone else face anything like this? What did you end up doing?
I had a good friend who was a subtitler. For movies it might not be so bad, but for TV, it is a hectic and thankless job with quick burnout, and you stop caring very much. She had to subtitle an hour or two a day of English shows into Arabic. You get better subtitles going into your first language, but it’s easy to miss some nuances of the original, especially if you have both British and American originating shows to translate.
The Japanese whows the OP is taking ab out is probably a native Japanese speaker.
Watching American movies in Thailand, we’ve seen both Thai and English subtitles that were unbelievably bad. In some cases the English subtitles were nonsensical homophones of the English, with wrong words in every sentence. In other cases the English subtitles were obviously translated from the already-wrong Thai subtitles of the English-language film.
But the pièce de résistance was a detective film in which the subtitler had paid no attention to the voice. Every subtitle was a complete fabrication, a random detective-like phrase with no connection whatsoever to the movie’s plot or the actual spoken word. :smack:
Do not want!
Having got that out of the way, of course I’d prefer good subs, but if it is a choice between bad subs and no subs at all, I’ll live with bad subs. (Such as Chinese produced English subs for Japanese media.) I recently watched A Man Who Was Superman on Youtube, and while the subs weren’t bad, someone had obviously done a faulty search and replace–IIRC, it was every “t” in every word in the subs being replaced with a capital version.
I’m getting less and less tolerant of them as time goes on.
Awkward calques, inappropriately preserving grammatical structures, adding swearing to inappropriate places (like kids shows)…it all annoys me more than it used to.
One thing that’s specific to fan translations…when one group drops a series and another picks up where they left off…and changes how names are transliterated, how characters titles are translated (or even if they are), and things like that. Two different groups taking different approaches to them is understandable, if they’re working independently, but when the second is literally taking over for the first…yargh.
With my hearing I need subtitles. Even bad subtitles/captioning are better than nothing. That said, other than some martial arts films on Netflix I’m not that familiar with Japanese / Chinese subtitling. The examples given in this thread would probably make me give up on a film or show. I can not watch things with dialogue I can’t pick up, it’s a pointless waste of time.
In case you aren’t familiar with the bad subs I was alluding to with the “do not want” earlier, there was a subbed Chinese bootleg of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith that came out soon after the movie’s theatrical release. The title of the bootleg was Star War the Third Gathers: The Backstroke of the West. (I see that someone has dubbed the full movie to match the subs!)
(This is the third movie, so it doesn’t have Dennis or Upright Slug, though it does have The Emperor Daft Serious.)
I’ve (intentionally) bought bootleg Chinese DVD sets of Japanese TV serieses, and while the subs aren’t Backstroke of the West bad, they do have problems, such as sometimes translating names literally, such as (for example) characters named Yumi or Ichiro being called “Snow” or “First Son.”
I’m less tolerant of bad subtitles in English and Spanish than any other languages; unsurprisingly because those are the languages I speak. English is just annoying if it doesn’t match, but when Spanish subtitles don’t match I find myself getting distracted as I try to figure out things like why did they translate that as headmistress when the actress clearly said principal which has a direct cognate?
I’m bilingual native Italian and have very strong Spanish as well, and I agree…these languages are very popular and well l spoken, so I tend to think a translation by committee may be a better approach…
The worst translations are th expletives and terms of endearment, I feel. They needn’t be a word for word translation, but should evoke the sense of the destination language. And this will vary also on whether it’s British English or Castellano or Mexican Spanish, etc. I imagine the same is true in other languages
RiffTrax on Amazon Prime has some extraordinarily bad subtitles, they’re so awful I really hope they’re a result of machine translation then somebody actually putting the effort in.
If you don’t know RiffTrax, they’re the successor to Mystery Science Theater 3000 where people talk over and make fun of bad movies as you watch. When I watch Rifftrax I keep the subtitles on for the original movie, simply so that I can still follow the actual plot while they make fun of since they will talk over the dialog. When I saw RiffTrax was on Amazon I was excited since it was a much easier way to watch them, but while the film transfers are fine the subtitles added by Amazon are horrendous. Basically somebody decided to not only subtitle the actual movie itself, they also decided to subtitle the people riffing on the movie, which now leads to the same problem that when people are talking over the movie dialog it becomes impossible to subtitle both but they still try to do it. About 50% of the dialog both in-movie and in-riff is lost because it’s impossible to subtitle everything leading to a very “What’s the point?” in terms of why they tried to subtitle the riffs in the first place if it interferes with the original subtitles.
In addition the subtitles for both seem like they were done by a computer. Words are misspelled or completely incorrect all the time, and proper names or references to other media are almost always either misspelled or written using an apparent phonetic translation not knowing they were proper names. John Rhys-Davies becomes “John Reese Davis” for example.
I can ignore bad subtitles as long as what is typed is conveying the gist of what was spoken. I did have to skip using them for an episode of Medium because the subtitles were way too fast compared to the dialogue. As in the subs were a few minutes ahead of what was being spoken.
Now that I’m officially Over The Hill, I have far less patience for such things. If I find that something I was doing for fun, becomes work, I stop doing it. There’s always alternatives.
My “favorite annoyance” with modern subtitling, is English under English. Where they even manage to get THE SAME LANGUAGE wrong. Glad I haven’t lost my hearing yet.