For example, whenever I watch an American movie with Japanese subtitles: the translation kind of sucks since there are words translated literally word by word making zero sense or lack of taking account of visual context from a scene. Depends on who translated the dialog, it could be that translators didn’t watch the movie or understand the context in specific scenes.

I recall watching Clear & Present Danger (Harrison Ford) with JP sub, there was a piece of dialog where the commander of a special forces unit gave the orders on planting explosives in which he ordered them to “cook it” basically implying on detonating the trigger but the subtitles translated this as 料理しろ which is incorrect when you account the scene’s context.

Whether you speak German, French, Spanish or etc. are the translated subtitles crap when it comes to movies where colloquialisms (slang), jokes (humor) or wordplay (puns) are thrown into the mix while listening to the original English dub? It’s because subtitles only convey a message but can miss nuances from spoken dialog via the source language.

  • inconel@lemmy.ca
    1·
    17 hours ago

    AFAIK about Jp movie subs:

    • Some Hollywood AAA type of movie won’t give actuql media to avoid leaks and/or very tight deadline. I don’t know if this still holds true, but past movie subtitles definitely had this issue.
    • Multimedia translation follows “4 letters/sec” guideline, based on average reading comprehension while following movie, which can cut down a lot of subtleties.
    • On DVD or other budget-tight medium often people do subtitles for their professional training so the quality may vary.

    Edit: I checked the JP translator of Clear and Present Danger - it’s Natsuko Toda. She had controversies in 80-00s movie translation because of lots of sloppy mistakes, ignoring background/references and making up unnatural phrases. LOTR (fellowship of the ring) even had subtitle revisions in DVD release, but she’s fast and prolofic so lots of Hollywood major movies at that time had her subtitle. I assure other translators take more time and have better quality (but it maybe hard to avoid her for older movies).