{"id":184,"date":"2007-01-09T10:32:22","date_gmt":"2007-01-09T17:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/09\/subtitle-fun\/"},"modified":"2007-10-26T01:03:45","modified_gmt":"2007-10-26T06:03:45","slug":"subtitle-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/subtitle-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Subtitle Fun!"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are so many times I wish I understand all other languages just so I could laugh at subtitle translations. Even my teeny bit of French sometimes is enough to know when they’ve missed the meaning (or skipped entire lines). However, with Bollywood film? Sometimes you don’t even need to know Hindi to laugh at the subtitles. There were many grammatical issues with the subtitles to the film Taal<\/a><\/i> (which was otherwise pretty good, if over-melodramatic, and had some of the best Indian music I’ve ever heard), but these two were on a whole different level.<\/p>\n

\"taal2\"<\/a>
\nUm…”cent” does mean “one hundred,” which is what he said. In fact, he said “one hundred percent” in English (as Indians often do, mixing English with Hindi often within the same sentence). Yet they translated the “one hundred” into French for the English subtitles. Very multi-lingual of them. (BTW, this never happens elsewhere…they usually do subtitle the English, because the speakers switch back and forth too quickly for it to register sometimes, but IN ENGLISH. Not French. They’re not doing some fancy trick to show you how they’ve suddenly switched to a different language, as they did in l’auberge espagnole<\/a><\/i> to indicate the English-speaker’s broken French.)<\/p>\n

And my favorite:
\n\"taal1\"<\/a>
\nDude. “Mumbai” means “Mumbai.” Who knew? The best part is that the actual-within-the-movie “Mumbai” showed up first, then the subtitle followed a moment after, like a live subtitler was doing it and realized that we might not know what “Mumbai” meant and he’d better throw up a “Mumbai” just to make sure. Throughout the rest of the film, they subtitled “Mumbai” as “Bombay,” so I could see if they had indicated that Mumbai was Bombay, but no. Mumbai is Mumbai.<\/p>\n

I think that takes the cake for the most pointless subtitle ever.<\/p>\n

edit<\/b>: in the funny subtitle vein, check out the English subtitles to a Chinese pirated Revenge of the Sith<\/i>: The Backstroke of the West<\/a>. (Thanks glow_boy<\/a> over on Livejournal for that link!) Thirty-two down, note that the Jedi Council continues in…The Presbyterian Church! That’s right, folks. There is an explanation for that particular translation down in the comments which makes sense, but still. My Indian-film subtitles can’t hold a candle to Engrish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are so many times I wish I understand all other languages just so I could laugh at subtitle translations. Even my teeny bit of French sometimes is enough to know when they’ve missed the meaning (or skipped entire lines). However, with Bollywood film? Sometimes you don’t even need to know Hindi to laugh at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[126,266],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":182,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/january-2007-readingwatching-recap\/","url_meta":{"origin":184,"position":0},"title":"January 2007 Reading\/Watching Recap","author":"Jandy","date":"March 25, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"This isn't late at all, is it? Nope, not at all. Moving on now. Reactions to Rain Man, Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Curse of the Golden Flower, Possession: A Romance, The Emperor Jones and more after the jump. And the next time I need to procrastinate, maybe I can\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books and Reading"","block_context":{"text":"Books and Reading","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":295,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/district-b-13-parkour-video\/","url_meta":{"origin":184,"position":1},"title":"District B-13 Parkour video","author":"Jandy","date":"April 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I watched the French action film District B-13 last weekend, and though I wouldn't call it a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, it was extremely entertaining eye candy. The story is basically that a futuristic Paris has been divided into different districts, with varying levels of lawlessness. District\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Film"","block_context":{"text":"Film","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/film\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":200,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/the-ruin-old-english-film\/","url_meta":{"origin":184,"position":2},"title":"“The Ruin” (Old English) film","author":"Jandy","date":"January 30, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I came across this short film in a blog by an Anglo-Saxon scholar, the Unlocked Wordhoard. It's a 6-minute adaptation of an Old English elegiac poem, \"The Ruin,\" done by some students at the University of Oxford. I hadn't read the poem before (Old English and modern English text here),\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books and Reading"","block_context":{"text":"Books and Reading","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1173,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/film-thought-of-the-day\/","url_meta":{"origin":184,"position":3},"title":"Film Thought of the Day","author":"Jandy","date":"May 27, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"If you aren't at least a little bit charmed by The Young Girls of Rochefort, you are a hopeless cynic. (Sorry, couldn't find any good clips with English subtitles, and not even this trailer has them, but trust me, whatever they're saying isn't important. The first ten minutes of music\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Film"","block_context":{"text":"Film","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/film\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":33403,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/the-story-of-film-on-tcm-chapter-11\/","url_meta":{"origin":184,"position":4},"title":"The Story of Film on TCM: Chapter 11","author":"Jandy","date":"November 25, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"[Turner Classic Movies is airing Mark Cousins' epic documentary The Story of Film, playing one episode a week accompanied by films discussed in that week's episode. I'm writing up my thoughts on each episode. I got behind four weeks ago, but rather than give up, I'm going to just post\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Film"","block_context":{"text":"Film","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/film\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/The_Story_of_Film-70s.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1396,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/fb100-92-amelie\/","url_meta":{"origin":184,"position":5},"title":"FBTop100 #92: Amelie","author":"Jandy","date":"September 24, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"This post is part of a project to watch the Film Bloggers' 100 Favorite Non-English Films. Am\u00c3\u00a9lie France 2001; dir: Jean-Pierre Jeunet starring: Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz screened 4\/6\/08; DVD Previous Viewing Experience: I've seen this at least four times, but most of them were pretty soon after it came\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Film"","block_context":{"text":"Film","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/film\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"AMELIE-20","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/images\/FB100title_106B\/AMELIE20_thumb.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}