Continuity in the subtitles?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/12/13 05:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/12/13/503017.aspx

The other day, I talked about how a particular scene in the movie Good Morning Vietnam did not look like Vietnamese to me, despite some claims of others to the contrary.

The comments then did talk a bit about the apparent variation in the English, French, and Chinese translations.

I thought I would share the rest of the subtitles that the movie within the movie (Beach Blanket Bingo) was sporting.....

I guess people can now independently look at the variability in the translation.

I do not have the original movie or a transcript thereof to judge the accuracy of the English (one of the other questions that was raised), but I thought this might be something, at least....

 

This post brought to you by "我" (U+6211, a.k.a. a CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH meaning "our, us, I, me, my, we"

# rb on 13 Dec 2005 5:48 AM:

I don't know about the chinese/vietnamese/japanese/whatever ones, but the french subtitles match the english ones quite well.

# Michael S. Kaplan on 13 Dec 2005 9:00 AM:

The trouble with the Chinese subtitles was that a single frame was not really matching the other languages -- a hazard of not including complete sentences since different languages would tend to structure things differently....

# Maurits [MSFT] on 13 Dec 2005 9:25 AM:

There's also the question of how well the Vietnamese audio matches...

Sometimes translations are deliberately different for cultural reasons.

When the movie /Sailor Moon R/ was translated from Japanese to English, for release to American audiences, the homosexual undercurrent between Fiore and Mamoru (Darian) was completely written out.

# James Dobson on 14 Dec 2005 11:42 PM:

Hmmm... my Chinese sucks, couldn't read some of the chars. Hoping someone who actually knows the language can fill in the gaps.

From top to bottom:

去看看
Let's go and see


我的感覺
My feeling (is)


應該由 __ 她
(we) should *something* her.
[No, it's not dirty]


快些!
quickly!


你們一班傢伙, 快些 __
you (group of) guys, quickly!


Matches the English well enough, I think.
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