Quality of subtitles for Chinese movies

[RichardVV]

I was watching a movie today, "Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon"

I understood enough of the language to realize that the subtitles totally cheapened the movie by being incorrect and shallow. In one scene where Zilong clashed a bit with CiauYing , Somehow "I regret not have killed CiaoCiao back then" or something like that spurted out while the real dialog was totally different in meaning. The subtitles were plain and ...crappy_rpg_story-like where the original dialog actually had some dept and meaning...

Are some people trying to degrade Chinese movies with subtitles or are the distributers hiring university students for some cheap labour...

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All that stuff upstairs is what I remember of a conversation with a friend this morning...

Is he just crazy or does he have a point somewhere... He was planning to mutilate some of his cds on the way home.

[liuzhou]

Consider yourself lucky!

Chinese DVD movies (and Western movies sold in China) often have subtitles from completely different movies.

At least this one was vaguely close, if inaccurate.

[lemur]

No conspiracy there. They just suck.

Even when the subtitles translate from one European language to another I've seen some serious mistakes creep in. Even to the point of misrepresenting what the characters are really saying.

I would say that the quality of subtitles is not a priority for filmmakers.

[adrianlondon]

One clear example is the film "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon". I watched that at the cinema in London when it first came out. God, the subtitles were really crap. Whole sentences of stuff spoken in lovely Mandarin translated into something like "Oh, my bad".

Not quite, but you get the jist.

Anyway ... then I got it on DVD 9same crappy subtitles) and decided to watch the dubbed version. Excellent! After they realised the film might actually be popular abroad, they got decent translators in, and actors, and did a decent dubbing effort.

I think most subtitles are there just for the sake of it as they tend not to expect a big foreign market for these films. So, despite it usually being the case that you're better off watching foreign films titled than dubbed, in this particular case, it was the other way around.

[lemur]

adrianlondon, very interesting.

I either watch movies just once or if I watch them again so much time has elapsed that I don't remember details like that. So I've never experienced what you describe.

[skylee]

"Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon" is not a good film IMO.

[RichardVV]

Just to make sure, It was my friend's rant as I pointed out in the spot that looks like my sig. I sunk my DVD player a few weeks ago so I wouldn't know anything about DVD subtitles or whatever. Though I have heard the film he watched had somewhat low ratings. However, it won't stop him since he's a total fan of 三国 or something...

I found a good store for renting DVDs, I just need to persuade the owner to rent me her DVD player too since she has University Exams afterall so she won't be using it much.

[Alewife]

How about movies in Mandarin that are subtitled in Simplified? Are the subtitles fairly reliable? Because I usually have to have both the spoken word and the subtitle to understand the dialog.

[renzhe]

I would be surprised if the official releases had mistakes in Chinese subtitles.

I haven't seen many mistakes while watching TV shows and movies. Most of the time, they are correct down to the last character.

Subtitles in foreign languages are a different story, though.

[Alewife]

That's good to know!

Maybe the problem with the foreign subtitles is that it costs too much to get good translators?

[Lu]

One thing I started to notice with Chinese subtitles for Chinese movies (usually HK movies dubbed Cantonese to Mandarin and subtitled in Mandarin) is that the subtitles consistently have the same meaning but in different words. When a character says 'bu hao yisi', the subtitles will say 'duibuqi' and vice versa. Really annoying.

Generally I find that HK movies are usually badly subtitled in English as well. Don't know whether they are re-titled when they are distributed to an actual foreign market. When MTV in Holland started to show some HK movies, they managed to translate not the original Cantonese for the subtitles, but the bad English subtitles. Very, very sloppy. Seems like nobody cared. I know other Chinese movies on Dutch tv are mostly subtitled straight from the original Chinese, which is much better.

[atitarev]

The quality of subtitles is not only a problem with Chinese movies but Japanese and Korean. Especially it's annoying when different episodes are translated by different people, I also have an impression that the source language can also be different! You get discrepancies in translating names. The characters in the Japanese drama "Hana yori Dango" (花より男子) Tsukushi (つくし or 筑紫) becomes Sancai (not even Shancai 杉菜), Hanazawa Rui becomes Huaze Lei, etc, the names that were used in the Taiwanese version of the series (流星花园). The last episodes' translation in both seasons was just shocking.

I have a suspicion that sometimes translation of subtitles is made by online translation engines.

One thing I started to notice with Chinese subtitles for Chinese movies (usually HK movies dubbed Cantonese to Mandarin and subtitled in Mandarin) is that the subtitles consistently have the same meaning but in different words. When a character says 'bu hao yisi', the subtitles will say 'duibuqi' and vice versa. Really annoying.

Yes, this happens when the source language is different and the translation of the audio track was made by different people.

EDIT:

Having English subtitles in a non-English language movie could be considered luxury because it's not meant for the English speakers, most movies may not have any foreign language subtitles at all but if movies are sold overseas then subtitles should be a priority. The cost of better subtitles is low, let's hope the quality will improve.

Edited July 24, 2008 at 11:21 PM by atitarev

[zhwj]

In the subtitle translation I've done, there have been a number of issues that contribute to a poor-quality final product.

(1) Translator incompetence: I've edited several sets of already-translated subtitles where it was obvious that a non-native speaker did them while relying heavily on dictionaries and machine translators (probably because it was cheaper than hiring a native-speaking translator outright). That's what causes the stilted phrasing.

(2) Timing: Subtitles are often an afterthought. Once the final edit is done, the filmmakers don't leave too much time for the translation, so the job is often rushed.

(3) Timing (2): If it isn't rushed, then they're often still in the process of editing the film. Scenes get pulled out, inserted, or changed around, and the translator may not be working with the most up-to-date edit. This may result in subtitles that don't have anything to do with the dialogue. For one movie, the script manager was describing scenes over the phone and then sending me new dialogue by SMS a month after I'd handed in my translation.

(4) Subtitle insertion: Once the subtitles are translated, they need to be inserted into the film at the appropriate times. Ideally, the translator would be given a time-indexed dialogue list and would return a list of English-language dialogue using the same time index, but I've never had that happen. Instead, it's either (a) they haven't put any subtitles on at all, so I have to work with the editor in the studio as he decides the precise time to insert each line, or (B) they're in such a rush that they don't even ask me to come to the editing studio, but simply take my copy and shove it into the film where the corresponding Chinese lines would go. Obviously, if the editor doesn't know English and misses a line somewhere, problems could crop up.

(5) Length issues: you can put a lot more information in 45 Chinese characters (which seems to be the standard line length) than in 45 letters, so a lot of the time something has to be left out, particularly when the Chinese uses a lot of traditional idioms and historical references that probably would need to be explained at length to make sense to a foreign audience - better to just leave them out. (Issue (2) comes into play here: given enough time, a concise, meaningful translation could probably be found, but it's just not possible on a rush job. And the director often has peculiar ideas of how the film should be conveyed to a foreign audience; once, I was instructed to translate the subtitles into "Hemingway-esque" sentences, even though no one in the film really spoke like a Hemingway character.)

[Lu]

this happens when the source language is different and the translation of the audio track was made by different people.

That would be an explanation, but given the sheer consistency of the inconsistency (it seems that you will never ever have bu hao yisi subtitled as bu hao yisi) I have begun to suspect they do this on purpose. No idea why.

[atitarev]

...given the sheer consistency of the inconsistency (it seems that you will never ever have bu hao yisi subtitled as bu hao yisi) I have begun to suspect they do this on purpose. No idea why.

It's because you're watching Hong Kong movies and they are translated from Cantonese (audio and subtitles separately). Although, in 甜蜜蜜 and 天下无贼 the Mandarin subtitles are good, they match the dialogues.

[Alewife]

Zhwj, thanks for the interesting description of the process, it explains a lot!

[dafne84]

Hi! I am looking for a website where I can download Chinese telefilms subtitles (for example telefilm 流星花园) in semplified Chinese. Could someone tell me where I can find them?

Thanks very much!

Michela:)

[renzhe]

What's a telefilm?

In any case, you could try shooter.cn

[Lu]

A telefilm is a film made for television (as opposed to a film made for the cinema).

[atitarev]

Subtitles for 流星花园 don't exist on the web. I ripped a portion of it (about 1 episode) with a small number of errors to be fixed but the way it's done on my DVD it's hard to split by episodes.

I searched for the subs (流星花园) on the web, they don't seem to exist, there are only the Chinese version of the Japanese series (Hana-yori Dango　- 花より男子).

The original is in the fantizi, so if you had the soft copy, it's not hard to convert to jiantizi, although, I found they use a lot of variant, non-standard hanzi in Taiwanese movies (or Japanese kanji sometimes), which have to be converted manually. Wenlin helps to find those characters.