Thursday, September 4, 2008
A&E Iranian film subtitles lost in translation?
Posted by Curt Holman @Curt_Holman on Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 7:08 PM
This week I write about the High Museum's latest program in its "Iranian Film Today" series, its 11th annual celebration of the vibrant cinema of Iran. Based on the screeners for the three films I watched, however, Iranian film might have an Achilles' Heel: the subtitles. All three films had some kind of glitch with the English-language subtitles. Persian Carpet suffered from the least consequential problem: the subtitles were white letters with no borders, so if the characters happened to be wearing white clothes or standing in colorless landscapes, their words turned invisible. (Austin Powers in Goldmember made an elaborate gag about that kind of snafu.)
Unfinished Stories (pictured) included many of the kind of typos that resemble spellcheck errors. Among the actual lines I read in the film were:
1. A young woman orders "a stake sandwich" at a restaurant.
2. Two different characters "sewer to God" that they're being honest.
3. "We were chocked up."
4. "He thinks the boggy man is going to get him." (Actually, that would probably be as bad as the bogey man.)
5. "But I don't know anywhere!"
6. "Sir, clime in."
Those kinds of goofs can actually add to the fun of watching a foreign film, if not exactly appropriate to Unfinished Stories' serious tone. Old Hong Kong martial arts flicks are notorious for the creative treatment of English.
Things weren't so amusing for the dialogue in A Few Kilos of Dates for a Funeral, which seems to have been translated by someone with a shaky grasp of the English language.:
"He has no harm or some, does he?"
"It's me to like it."
"Forger it." (At least three times.)
"... even if you bedt me to death."
"With your permission we go for a vide and retuorn soon."
"God willing, when can we eat my wedding's sweet?"
Practically every other sentence seemed to have some kind of error, to the point that the conversation "sounded" like Pidgin English. I could understand the meaning of the sentences with no problem, but the subtitles nevertheless added another layer of "distance" between the audience and the characters. It's one of the few cases I've ever experienced of subtitles potentially diminishing the film as a whole.
Photo courtesy of Scheherazad Media International
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