I saw “The Devils Backbone” last night, it’s a really excellent ghost story by the director of “Pan’s Labyrinth”. It’s in Spanish with English subtitles. I noticed that they subtitles were very different from what was actually being said in Spanish in several places, and I can’t understand why. With dubs, you have the excuse that you are trying to make the words fit the movements of the character’s mouth, but with subtitles you usually get a much more accurate translation (watch any of Miyazaki’s films with the English dub and the English subtitles on at the same time and see two different films at once!). I can’t understand why they made these changes.
There are two that really stand out to me. First, the cursing was changed around a lot. Pretty much the only insulting names that the characters call each other are “puta” and “maricon” (“bitch” and “faggot”). In the subtitles, I saw “puta” translated as a number of different things, from “bitch” to “stupid” to “asshole”. I know cursing in Spanish can get a little monotonous compared to English, but the choices seemed to change the character - when the boys called people “puta” it was usually translated to lesser insults, when adults used it they cranked up the profanity.
The other big change I noticed was when a boy is lowered through a window and falls and hurts his foot. He’s asked if he is hurt, and in Spanish he says “It’s broken”, but in the subtitles it says “A bit”. Now, there’s a big difference between saying your hurt “a bit” and saying your foot is broken, and I don’t know why they changed that. Saying “A bit” makes the boy look either weak (for not walking on his slightly hurt foot) or extremely tough if the interpretation is that his foot was hurt. In the end it shows him hopping on one foot which makes the ending a lot more bleak if you know he broke his foot.
Is the The Devil’s Backbone earlier than Pan’s Labyrinth?
I remember reading on the Pan’s website, or the dvd commentary, or something like that, that the director did the translations for Pan’s himself, because of stuff like that.
In my experience (which is a lot, since virtually all the movies I see in theaters or on TV are in English with Spanish subtitles) subtitles are frequently wildly inaccurate, especially for slang and profanity. Having accurate subtitles is quite unusual.
(On of my favorites: In Deadwood, the subtitles frequently referred to the main saloon as El Gimnasio (The Gymnasium). It finally dawned on me that the translator had mis-heard The Gem as The Gym.)
Some of the mistranslations were just bizarre. At one point they clearly call Carmen “principal” but the subtitle said instead “director.” Her role was much closer to principal than director, so I couldn’t figure out why they switched it considering principal is a concept English speakers readily understand.
I’ve tried to find a link I remember but have so far failed. Salon.com (I think) ran an article a few years ago written by or about a person who writes subtitles for a living. As I recall, this person complained that:
They usually have impossibly little time to do the job
They usually work from the script, not a cut of the film
The script provided often doesn’t match the scenes as shot
