Thursday, November 27, 2014

The translation issues in foreign language movies

I love movies and increasingly crave movies in foreign languages provided they have English subtitles in it. I rarely go for dubbed into English movies because it is rare that they do justice to the people speaking the language as sometimes I have stopped watching movies where the mouth is speaking something earlier and the dubbed translation is later and also because of the fact that you cannot literally translate the another language into English because of different words and alphabets that other languages may have and English may lack. And now I am seeing in movies which are not professionally subtitled that you see that it is literally translated by the computer and then the incoherent structure of sentences start to pop up and you are left scratching your head that what was the dialogue was about. Although you may enjoy the movie if you are as experienced as me in watching the subtitles and the movie at the same time but if it is done professionally it makes a happy movie watching experience. Most of the Chinese language movies are professionally translated and you can make sense of what they are talking about since they have both Mandarin and English subtitles on it and they are more or less understandable but some of the Korean movies and also Russian and some other foreign languages movies which are not supposed to be shown outside their countries have subtitles done by some downloadable software and they literally translate movies which if you are not use to it, you will not make sense of it. And because of this, despite being a good story line and movie, you are just frustrated and mad about not watching a good movie. I think that since now the world is global place and movies are increasingly seen outside their home countries and they are getting most of their revenues outside their home countries, they should at least do a better job in subtitling their movies into English professionally as it would ensure a wider audience and more adherents.

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