A few days ago I wrote a little bit about translation, specifically in the context of poetry as explored in Douglas Hofstadter's book, "Le Ton Beau de Marot." I was thinking about that this evening watching a Brazilian show, dubbed from Portuguese to English, on Netflix. We also had subtitles, in English, turned on (because we pretty much always do).
If you've ever watched a non-English program dubbed into English with the subtitles on, you know where I'm going with this: the dub and the subtitles quite often don't match. And quite often they really don't match. Almost like they aren't from the same program.
Which is very much like the many translations from French to English that Hofstadter examined of a single poem. If you were to read some of those translations side-by-side, you might be hard pressed to say they were the "same" poem.
In the case of movies and other visual programming, it would be easy to think that there would be one translator that did one translation, and then they get the voice actors to read those lines and the subtitles to display them. That it would be just like in the original English, where the dialog and the subtitles match.
But a bit more thought and you realize that it's not so simple, that each of these "channels" serve a unique purpose, meet unique needs. And then, when you get all the way to the end of the credits and see the list of voice actors for all the different languages and then check the list of available subtitle languages, you realize there are many different translations of the original out there.
If you've ever watched a non-English program dubbed into English with the subtitles on, you know where I'm going with this: the dub and the subtitles quite often don't match. And quite often they really don't match. Almost like they aren't from the same program.
Which is very much like the many translations from French to English that Hofstadter examined of a single poem. If you were to read some of those translations side-by-side, you might be hard pressed to say they were the "same" poem.
In the case of movies and other visual programming, it would be easy to think that there would be one translator that did one translation, and then they get the voice actors to read those lines and the subtitles to display them. That it would be just like in the original English, where the dialog and the subtitles match.
But a bit more thought and you realize that it's not so simple, that each of these "channels" serve a unique purpose, meet unique needs. And then, when you get all the way to the end of the credits and see the list of voice actors for all the different languages and then check the list of available subtitle languages, you realize there are many different translations of the original out there.