Cheap subtitling from countries like Malaysia is ruining the nuances of English language films abroad, resulting in gaffes like David Attenborough being referred to as Sherlock Holmes ...
by Danny Leigh Tuesday 20 March 2007
Outsourcing has been accused of having any of number of disastrous consequences for the global labour market - but only now has it emerged that it may also be helping scramble the minds of the world's moviegoers.
According to disgruntled British translators, the problem is that the studios' preference for cheap subtitles produced in India and Malaysia is making a nonsense of English language films abroad.
Frustrated at seeing what are already low wages forced down still further, native subtitlers have begun compiling examples of the errors littering British and American movies released in foreign markets. And from their research, there certainly seems no shortage of cases where literal-minded or just plain odd translations have rendered Hollywood movies incomprehensible (or, if we're going to be honest about this, more incomprehensible).
In Taiwan, for example, audiences enjoying My Super Ex-Girlfriend (the Ivan Reitman comedy starring Uma Thurman) had a line describing a zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment relayed to them as "We hold the highest standards for sexual harassment". Elsewhere, Chinese Anne Hathaway fans taking in The Princess Diaries 2 will have been given a strange insight into western culture, when a mention of David Attenborough was subtitled as Sherlock Holmes (something I find only becomes more puzzling the longer I think about it). Vietnam vets have become veterinarians from Vietnam; spaceships in sci-fi films have been warned of the hazards of looming fields of steroids.
All of which does seem to prove the translators' point that a proper job of subtitling needs a degree of cultural context and linguistic nuance, something which the studios' cost cutting seems ill-equipped to provide. Quite apart from issues of fair wages, there's also the fact that foreign audiences surely deserve to see movies the way they were intended to be seen. At the climax of a high-octane thriller, the difference between "Stop! He's got a gun!" and "Stop! He's got some gum" could, you might imagine, be of no small importance.
Perhaps we need to throw our weight firmly behind Britain's subtitlers, not out of patriotism, but simply as cinephiles. After all, would you want the pivotal line of Francis Ford Coppola's meditation on war, Apocalypse Now, to have been given to you as "I love the smell of napalm in the morning - smells like Viscounts"? Or seen Some Like It Hot end with Jack Lemmon being told by his amorous suitor: "You nobody! You are a prefect?" And, as for Silence of the Lambs, surely no audience deserves to have Hannibal Lecter terrify Clarice Starling with the revelation that: "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate some liver with him and then we had ice cream"? As Ronnie Barker would have no doubt agreed, it is, and always will be, all in the worms.
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