Anatoly Vorobey quotes (in Russian) a Facebook post by Gombo Tsydynzhapov about watching Cowboy Bebop in English with French subtitles and discovering that the two versions radically diverged, so that when the hero says “Hell, I’ll take my chances” the subtitle has “Rien a faire. C’est la vie,” and “I hate theme parks” gets rendered as “Maintenant, tout est fini”, which leads Gombo to the thought that in the Japanese original everything might be totally different. Anatoly adds:
Просто сад расходящихся тропок какой-то. Понравилась оформление идеи (не новой, конечно), что появление дополнительной версии с совсем другим текстом заставляет обе подозревать в недостоверности.
It’s a sort of garden of forking paths. I liked the presentation of the idea (which isn’t new, of course) that the appearance of an additional version with a completely different text makes you suspect both of being unreliable.
There is a lively comment thread; I was particularly struck by jr0, who says “Мне всерьез лингвисты задвигали, что перевести реплику Jesus Christ! как Черт! — норм” [Linguists have seriously suggested to me that translating the line “Jesus Christ!” as “the Devil!” is normal] and when called on it insists stubbornly that it is some kind of… sin? blasphemy?… to render a godly name by a satanic one, even if they are used equivalently in colloquial speech. An interesting form of prescriptivism!
I know just enough Japanese, and have watched enough anime, to know that English subtitles are often very free indeed.
That’s not always a bad thing or a sign of incompetence: quite often an Anglophone just wouldn’t say what the Japanese dialogue does in the situation in question. (Itadakimasu before eating is a blatant example. There just isn’t anything really comparable in English. But there are many more subtle cases.)
It reminds me of what I’ve mentioned previously about my early days in Ghana: for the first few weeks, I often found it embarrassingly difficult to follow the accent; then I went through a longer period where I understood all the sentences fine, but had no idea why the speaker had spoken them in that context. Some of that perplexed me right up until I started learning Kusaal.
It reminds me too of Roy Andrew Miller’s (I think it was) remark that the genuine idiomatic rendering of the English “I love you” into Japanese is silence.
just crosslinking to an earlier, albeit brief, thread on fansubs!
cf What’s up, Tiger Lily? Or, more subtly, The Magic Roundabout
Time for bed!
I’ve noticed this plenty of times with just watching English dubs with English subtitles.
The English dub will be adapted somewhat for an Anglophone audience. But the subtitles will often be intended as English subtitles for the original language. So, they often won’t match, usually in minor ways, but sometimes somewhat dramatically. I see this all the time watching anime on Netflix, but even sometimes with other genres.
It is said, and having myself watched it as a child I tend to believe it, that Samurai Pizza Cats was brought to the Israeli studio in charge of dubbing it without any translation or gloss of the original Japanese, and so the entire show was dubbed based on the production’s best guess of the plot given the video and the general properties of the soundtrack. The result being, of course, that much of the Hebrew version was absolute nonsense.
I haven’t been to Russia in over a decade. Has the rise of streaming services and subtitles everywhere finally killed off the old Eastern European tradition of having one person do a voiceover translation of foreign films? I remember it was still alive in Poland broadcast television as recently as the mid 20-teens but I haven’t noticed on recent trips. I would assume young people have no patience for that, but maybe it persists on broadcast TV for the older generations.
the old Eastern European tradition of having one person do a voiceover translation of foreign films
In the worst case, with the dub spoken over the original language soundtrack, which one still could partially hear; in the deluxe case, with one male speaker dubbing all małe roles and one female speaker dubbing all female roles. I need to pay attention when my wife next watches a Russian dubbed Netflix series (when we watch together, our preferred mode is original with Russian subtitles).
@hans, Vanya
This tradition is still alive on youtube, where enterprising individuals have been known to upload (homemade?) Russian dubbed versions of recent international releases…
what mollymooly said
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Up,_Tiger_Lily%3F
@PP, the culture of amateur fan dubbing is very, very well developed here.
One male speaker – why never female, i wonder? – because no studio has offered their dub or because this guy is a translator (commertial translations used to be horrible here – one of motivations for this culture is this) and has fans. There are also many amateur studios who offer several voices and have expensive equipment and supporting teams.
I think the studios learned to earn some money, but the principal means of distribution are torrent trackers (which bring no money) and their sites (for fans of this specific studio).
What you’re saying is logical – especially when everyone is using a phone. But the culture grew up around torrent trackers among users of computers.
About blasphemy:
1. Why exactly Jesus Christ! is not Боже?
2. I agree that it is very interesting, but beliefs in translation practices are not langauge peevery.
Everyone knows that when translating we constantly choose beetween several levels (and often have personal preferences for this or that level).
It is not unusual that when (a) equivalence on level A leads to mismatch up to antonymy on level B and (b) level B here is culturally important and for this reason (c) some people find a translation focused on A infelicitous.
I would myself be horrified by a translation that brings a text produced in a foreign scientific school in accordance with theories of a Russian scientific school where the two schools have a principal disagreement in analysis of something.
Because I (and in my particular example, not only I, but also we, and most readers of scientific texts – and this is of course not true for “Jesus” and “most readers” of entertaining texts where his name is used in this role) believe that specifics of a theory are more important than its function.
This specific instance is very funny.
But I disagree with the “linguists”: translation always takes culture, not only language into account. Functional equivalence at some level (while ignoring culture and other levels) proves nothing. It does not mean that the translation is “good” or “bad”.
It is a fact which readers of the translation will interpret, always according to their beliefs.
I don’t mean I agree with the guy, I only disagree with arguing against his opinion from linguistics alone.
The worst dub I ever suffered through was of the anime Cardcaptors. (It was subsequently redone, and it’s a shibboleth to refer to the properly translated, and not sliced up, version as “Cardcaptor Sakura.”) My younger brother was explaining the plot and characters to me, and I had to as in exasperation: “You’re telling me it’s a pure coincidence that the bad guys and the good guys each have a winged cat on their team?”
Here I download animes form torrent trackers together with some 12 translations (some by schoolchildren i think) and 7 dubs.
None is commercial, no commercial translations available for the title you’re interested in, and if there were one, you would never have given it a chance, it is going to be screwed up thoroughly (but unlike the translations by schoolchildren it would be more or less intelligible Russian that has little to do with the Japanese text) and some parts will remain untranslated because they were not aired.
I don’t know the state of affairs of the business today, but in 90s people joked about official commercial translaitons and in 00s they (I mean those that come with professional dubbing, some once commercial “one male voice” interpreters still have their fans) were not even taken seriously enough to joke about them.
They of course have their fans as well.
I often find myself looking for videos like this to show to my students.
https://www.tiktok.com/@lancul_official/video/7350996832266308865
https://youtube.com/shorts/wAyxHU3252g?si=kMYrhs55NOsshcKt
Oh, this happens within Polish. When a catastrophe just happened, as your hands meet above your head you have two choices: o Jezu and o kurwaaa (the only long vowel in the entire language, BTW).
Edit: also in vowel-unshifted English of Co. Wexford.
The worst dubbing I’ve seen was an episode of Baywatch in French in the early-mid 90s. It… wasn’t dubbing. Characters frequently kept speaking after they had shut their mouths.
But it had one voice per character, unlike the video with Polish voiceover I was treated to in the mid-10s.
Again in support of the guy:
It’s well known that for strong emotoins people resort to both sacred and profane language.
But analysing the fine structure in this langauge and then arguing that within this structure a certain English utterance – and I think one chosen to be appropriate for abstract “children” rather than the most “natural” one – matches the function of a specific element of the fine structure of Russian strong language would be difficult, I think this is not what “linguists” in question do.
While in turn discarding all the structure and arguing that “it is ‘English strong language’, and thus any element of ‘strong langauge of the target language’ is a good translation” is lazy, for “linguists” especially.
P.S. I also think English speakers translate “Allahu akbar” with either “Allahu akbar” or “God is great” and not with what they would have shouted themselves when a bomb explodes not far from where they are – which would be culturally inappropriate…
Though, translating it as “Allahu akbar” or “God is great” has drawbacks that contribute into islamophoby*. I’m afraid in 90s Russians misinterpreted it as a battle cry of fanatics.
*as does translating Allah as “Allah” and all the religious terminology with its transliteration, even though this is the Muslim approach to multilingualism of believers and even though I’m a proponent of exoticising everyone and everything and not fond of choices based on reaction to phobes.