I just finished watching a French movie on Netflix. I don’t speak French, but reading the subtitles gave me the impression that the speakers tended to be more terse and abrupt in their speech. Is this just an effect of the subtitles? Or is this a real property of the way the French language is structured?
With a sample size of one, you’d be hard-pressed to draw any conclusions, especially since any translation tends to be wordier than the original.
Watch a couple movies in english with french subtitles and see how the wordiness compares.
It could also be the style of the film, what film was it? Especially terseness can be quite typical in French film, when it’s really more of a personal thing. Not like they really are a whole nation of silent people, smoking, looking out of the window, and only occasionally breaking the silence to impart some insight into the affair they are having.
I suppose you could say there is a particular kind of abruptness to the French.
I don’t know about the audio “abruptness” but for written language, in my experience when translating software, English is among the more compact languages (though Hebrew beats it handily in that department). French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russia always presented problems fitting strings on the screen where English used to fit.
It’s more likely to be a decision by the translators doing the subtitles. Regardless of what language the original was in and what language it’s being translated to, it’s common for the translators to simplify what’s being said when they write the subtitles. They may think that a complete translation will take too long to read. They may just be lazy and decide that what they’ve included is good enough.
My wife is a French–>English translator. Her translations always came out shorter than the original. Maybe by 5%. A French translation of an English text is generally 10% longer than the original. Compare, “North Atlantic Treaty Organization” with “Organization de la Trait’e de l’Atlantique du Nord” (I think I have that right). The difference is three prepositions and three articles (only one of which added a syllable). There are other differences (maybe longer Latinate words compared to shorter Germanic ones), but the use of attributive nouns is a major difference.
Now French is spoken faster and the rate of information transfer may be similar.
Also, in general subtitles have size limitations which spoken text does not have. Watch any episode of Desperate Housewives with subtitles on: any time the Hispanic couple are talking among themselves, the written text is a lot shorter than what those two machine guns are saying.
And it’s “Organisation du Traité de l’Atlantique Nord”.
Quite a few signs, publications, etc. in Canada are in both French and English. In most cases, the French is noticeably larger than the English - but part of that is the fact that a lot more of written French than Englsh consists of extraneous silent letters and triple vowels. (tripthongs?) Plus, they don’t shorten things, especially written… sort of like “house of the dog” rather than “doghouse”. Jamming nouns together seems to be something German that he Angles still ahven’t managed to let go of.
I had interpreted the OP to mean that the English of the subtitles was less terse than the French that was spoken, which goes against what you’re saying here. Looking at it again, I see that the OP may have meant that the movie dialogue, judging by the subtitles, was more terse than if the same thoughts had originally been expressed in English.
Exactly. I have worked on a lot of bilingual projects in English and Spanish. Written Spanish runs about 20-30% longer than the equivalent English text. Watching films in English with Spanish subtitles, the Spanish often drops phrases or words in order to maintain synchronization. French is going to be similar to Spanish in being longer than English. Even in English subtitles of English dialog, words or phrases may be dropped to save time or space.
Thank you, as that is indeed what I meant. A friend of mine speaks Chinese (I believe Mandarin) and she once told me that the structure of the language is such that fewer words are used in a sentence compared to English. I have also read something similar about Latin; that its grammatical rules and structure lead to sentences that are very different and shorter than English.
Admittedly, I don’t have any objective evidence that the actors in the movie I watched (a romantic comedy) were in fact speaking shorter sentences than English actors would have. Perhaps it’s a culture difference in the way French speakers express themselves?
Hmm, now I wonder if my original impressions were completely wrong.
It’s not your imagination. Some languages are spoken more tersely but I think English is more terse than French. There was a paper last year talking aboutlanguage information density. Basically some languages are more terse (dense) but spoken at a slower rate while other languages are less dense and spoken quickly. In the study of 7 languages, Mandarin Chinese and German were the slowest while Japanese and Spanish were the fastest. The interesting part was that all languages average the same rate of information.
Terseness is not an attribute of language but of individual speakers and their styles. It is true that some languages are predominantly spoken in cultures that value brevity while others appreciate verbosity, but that is not something that is inherent in those languages. In and of itself, French does not allow for more or less terseness than English does.
In addition, you should know that subtitles offer nothing close to a complete translation of dialogue. This is not about laziness or translator discretion: given the speed of dialogue and the number of characters that will fit on the screen and that people watching can comfortably read, subtitlers are working under considerable constraints and need to be really to the point in their translations to make subtitles work. No matter what’s being subtitled, the result will probably always look terse because there’s just no space for more.
As a native German speaker, I notice when watching a German movie with English subtitles, that in the translation lots of the words and/or meaning is lost and/or shorten.
However, the same is happening when watching an English movie with German subtitles
I presume the same happens with French movies.
Written language is just slower than spoken language.
Do you have a cite for this? It seems to contradict Wolverine’s post above. And I can imagine, hypothetically, that one language might pack more information into each word or syllable than another language would.
Non.
(See, in English, that reply would have been only two-thirds as long.)
Touché!
English to French translator here.
Depends on the specific content and context of the text, of course, but as a general rule and especially when stylistic issues are involved, no, quite the opposite in fact. French is wordier, by a good 20% on (my) average. We love run-on sentences with multiple levels of nested clauses, the kind that in English you’d need a map and compass to puzzle your way through (IIRC either Zola or Hugo once produced a sentence running across *8 pages. *Not even trying for the record or anything). We hate repetitions with a passion bordering on the neurotic and will do anything, anything, including tacking on a 50 word gloss, in order to avoid using the same word twice in one paragraph. We love grammatical flourishes, and due to the nature of our respective languages where y’all have a singular but more precise verb, we tend to use a generic verb narrowed down by one or a bunch of adverbs (the stereotypical example : where an Englishman says “he swam across the ocean” [24 chars], we say “Il a traversé l’océan à la nage” [31 chars], literally “he crossed the ocean by swimming”).
Which, all in all, is why it’s much better to be a French -> English translator than the other way around, since translators usually get paid by the word in the source text 
But subtitles are a very specific context with strict rules, one that as a translator (and thus, an author) one will learn to hate with a passion. It’s like being tasked to transcribe a political speech via twitter, in real time, no abbreviations allowed. Feel me ? So, yes, you can cut to the heart of it and be terse in French.
But you won’t like it :).
Much nuance will be lost, and you’ll have to drop entire sentences or even arguments here and there, for the sake of brevity and legibility.
I hasten to add that it’s entirely possible to be terse, even… what’s the word, Spartan humour ?.. LACONIC, that’s the one ! To be laconic in French. But it is a conscious stylistic decision.
Latin definitely is more information packed - because every word shows up packing its own private declension that relies on what role the word plays in the sentence, you don’t need any articles, prepositions… whatsoever. The most famous example of this would probably be “Senatus PopulusQue Romanus”, “The Senate and the People of Rome”. Note the absence of “the”, “of” in the Latin.
Also, you can more or less string the words in any order you bloody like, and it will mean the same thing.