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Japanese subtitles in movies - naff or what?


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OK, my Japanese is getting good enough for me to be able to read the subtitles on movies and understand most of them - especially when I can understand whats going on in the film of course.

 

BUT. It seems to me that lots of the translations are TRASH - and sometimes the actual opposite meaning or nuance of what is being said on the screen in the movie is written up there in Japanese. Ever noticed when you find something funny and your Jfriends don't? or the other way round?....basically meaning that the lovely Japanese peeps I watch my movies with are basically getting a different movie to what I'm watching.

 

Obviously some things, especially comedy, are going to be difficult to translate (and some subtitled translations better than others) ------ but I'm sure its a bigger issue than just that.

 

Are there any J experts out there who can shed more light on this? Are the subtitles generally as bad as I suspect or not?

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I'm hearing you there buddy, even with my mediocre nihongo I can often notice gross misrepresentations of dialogue, its comical at times, when I quiz the good lady about it, she just shrugs her shoulders.

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thats true, when some one says " you F$%&king Muther F$%&ker" usually its a simple "BAKA!"...

 

When we watched Austin Powers 2 here we were the only one's in the packed cinema who laughed at the spoken comedy...while everyone laughed at the visual jokes..

 

some jokes just can't be translated.

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My wife says its half listen and half read.

 

Ok my private JR school student today read the word face but read it as fuuuuckkkk. try to explain that to a cool little jr high school student without feeling weird.

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You would wonder why they didnt get better translations, especially for these mega-money making blockbusters.

 

Who does them anyway, is there a main company doing this work or something?

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The doyenne of subtitle translation is a lady by the name of Toda Natsuko.

 

She got a lot of stick off Lord of the Rings fans for some of the lines in the film and for phonetically writing the characters names in katakana instead of semantically translating them as the translator of the books did. She also admitted to never having read the books, which was seen as heresy in some quarters.

 

There is probably some other stuff she did wrong but I'm not fanatical about LOTR myself and I can't remember what it was.

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I can't understand them anyway and ignore them. They get in the way. How can Japanese actually watch the pictures well anyway when they have to read text all the time. Sounds like it sucks to me.

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Toda Natsuko,,. NoFakie - are there basically just a few people doing these translations or what? I don't suppose there would be that many of them.......

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How do English subtitles for Japanese movies compare? Are they equally dodgie?

 

I remember reading in one of the articles about the stick Natsuko was getting for the LOTR that sometimes it is simply not possible to have subtitles for everything said by the characters. As a result, there is a fair amount of discretion on behalf of the translators...

 

And talking about naff translations, has anyone watched the NHK news whilst listening to the simultaneous English translation? I appreciate that doing simultaneous translating must be extremely difficult, but the information conveyed news is so inane it beggars belief. Is the news in this country really that bad?

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I asked a Japanese friend (who can understand English quite well) about this the other day, and they said that they thought English subtitles on a Japanese movre were usually not very good and didn't portray the true meaning and beauty of what was being said (!). Goes both ways, it seems.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Film companies make a simplified screenplay for giving to subtitle translators of all languages. The text is stripped of all subtlety and nuance so even if the translator is lousy, at least the audience in that country will get something comprehensible even if it doesn't really have all the meaning of the original.

 

I don't know how much subtitle translators get paid or what their work ethic is like generally, but you can imagine that instead of watching the film and striving to reflect every nuance faithfully, they just translate the little booklet and go out for a drink...

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  • 4 weeks later...

Many of the Japanese people that I know who have seen Matrix Reloaded have said that it was "muzukashii" and basically they couldn't understand it well.

 

Is that because of terrible subtitles, because the film is difficult to understand or a bit of both?

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Dubbed Japanese is hilarious. Well it sounds that way anyway. And it always sounds like the same "leading voice man" and "leading voice woman". They seem to be onto a good deal. cool.gif

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I sometimes listen to them when I'm watching in bed - my bedroom tv is not bilingual, so I have no choice. It's funny listening to the Japanese and yes it does always seem to be the same people doing the dubbing.

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