Asked out more than Joyce Brothers
Despite its superficial simplicity, English is a difficult language full of snares and traps. As "Erityistutkija",
a fellow Finn living in Canada recently observed, many colloquial
expressions in English can be quite obscure for somebody coming from a
different culture, such as "to drink Kool-Aid". Fortunately, there is
always the Urban Dictionary to clear such misunderstandings. (And it's not that long ago when my wife had to use it to check out what a "hodad" is.)
To make matters worse, English is a very compact language and its pronunciation has a pretty loose relationship with its spelling, so it is quite easy to mishear sentences because they are located so close to each other in the soundspace. (Ha ha, immediately after I had published this post, I noticed the news article "Apple: iPods built to last 'for years,' not 'four years'".) Of course, this compactness of the spoken language makes spelling bees, puns and knock-knock jokes possible in the first place. None of these three can be really said to exist in the Finnish language, because Finnish words tend to be longer than in English, and the pronunciation and spelling are pretty much in a one-to-one relationship.
One place where these properties of English cause problems is when the movies and television programs that are in English are subtitled for foreign audiences. The big markets like France and Germany tend to dub their imported programs, but with the exception of Disney movies, this is just not financially feasible in the small markets like Finland with its mere five million inhabitants. So all of you Americans who say that you "hate" reading subtitles, quit your bellyaching, us Finns had to learn to read them all the time. But it's actually not that bad: one quickly learns to just see the subtitles instead of actually reading them. And what better way could there be to learn a language to either direction? When my wife moved to Finland to be with me, she quickly picked up a lot of Finnish from the subtitles of every American show that we watched, turning all entertainment to edutainment with zero effort.
I really don't envy the people who have to translate and subtitle the movies and television shows such as The Simpsons or Buffy. (Let's hope that MST3K never reaches Finland.) There is a well-known Finnish website "Käännöskukkasia" that collects the most humorous mistranslations in both movies and TV shows, as spotted by the viewers. The site is inspired by the best-known mistranslation of all time, the immortal line "Maybe it's a drill" from Star Wars. But it's all done in a friendly spirit, of course, since we do understand how difficult the job of a television translator, especially when they are under strict deadlines.
Mistranslations stemming from simple mishearings of words that sound similar are pretty much "meh", with a possible exception of one time in the movie "A View to a Kill" at the point where the villains in the blimp see the Golden Gate, and "To a kill!" becomes "Tokyo!" In any case, you'd just assume that a professional translator would always afterwards check if the translated sentence even makes any sense, such as in "gin and Jews", or that in a men's bathroom you are more likely to find a glory hole than the Holy Grail.
Of course, in English the exact same words can mean many different things, so that when somebody is "working out", this is not at all the same as working outside. Saying "Thank you for your company" after a business dinner can make the unwary translator trip. And I do believe that I once read about a foreign visitor in America who met a sad end for not knowing the non-literal meaning of the word "freeze". Even so, you don't have to duck even if somebody yells "Shotgun!" or be afraid even if Home And Garden is going to come shoot you later.
Translation errors that come from the lack of cultural knowledge are occasionally more amusing. For example, guessing that a "Diaper Genie" is a baby prodigy. I remember one cop show in which some young man had been shot and killed on the street, and his mom had warned him not to walk through the projects. In the subtitles, this warning had something to do with the dangers of walking through a construction site. Another time, when a crazy woman rambled about her kid (who was nowhere to be seen), and the detective commented to another one that it's probably some milk carton kid she had kidnapped from some supermarket, in the subtitles this kid had become a human-shaped cardboard stand.
I haven't actually checked out this site since leaving the old country, so it might be interesting to see what the translators have achieved since then! Apparently, in the theme song of Family Guy, the father's name is "Lucky". Well, that should certainly make us effin' cry. In SNL (which seems to be a source for quite a few mistranslations), I guess that in certain sense, Bill Clinton really could have been the "forty-second president", so we can't quite fire the translator for that one, if it was translated from audio.
To make matters worse, English is a very compact language and its pronunciation has a pretty loose relationship with its spelling, so it is quite easy to mishear sentences because they are located so close to each other in the soundspace. (Ha ha, immediately after I had published this post, I noticed the news article "Apple: iPods built to last 'for years,' not 'four years'".) Of course, this compactness of the spoken language makes spelling bees, puns and knock-knock jokes possible in the first place. None of these three can be really said to exist in the Finnish language, because Finnish words tend to be longer than in English, and the pronunciation and spelling are pretty much in a one-to-one relationship.
One place where these properties of English cause problems is when the movies and television programs that are in English are subtitled for foreign audiences. The big markets like France and Germany tend to dub their imported programs, but with the exception of Disney movies, this is just not financially feasible in the small markets like Finland with its mere five million inhabitants. So all of you Americans who say that you "hate" reading subtitles, quit your bellyaching, us Finns had to learn to read them all the time. But it's actually not that bad: one quickly learns to just see the subtitles instead of actually reading them. And what better way could there be to learn a language to either direction? When my wife moved to Finland to be with me, she quickly picked up a lot of Finnish from the subtitles of every American show that we watched, turning all entertainment to edutainment with zero effort.
I really don't envy the people who have to translate and subtitle the movies and television shows such as The Simpsons or Buffy. (Let's hope that MST3K never reaches Finland.) There is a well-known Finnish website "Käännöskukkasia" that collects the most humorous mistranslations in both movies and TV shows, as spotted by the viewers. The site is inspired by the best-known mistranslation of all time, the immortal line "Maybe it's a drill" from Star Wars. But it's all done in a friendly spirit, of course, since we do understand how difficult the job of a television translator, especially when they are under strict deadlines.
Mistranslations stemming from simple mishearings of words that sound similar are pretty much "meh", with a possible exception of one time in the movie "A View to a Kill" at the point where the villains in the blimp see the Golden Gate, and "To a kill!" becomes "Tokyo!" In any case, you'd just assume that a professional translator would always afterwards check if the translated sentence even makes any sense, such as in "gin and Jews", or that in a men's bathroom you are more likely to find a glory hole than the Holy Grail.
Of course, in English the exact same words can mean many different things, so that when somebody is "working out", this is not at all the same as working outside. Saying "Thank you for your company" after a business dinner can make the unwary translator trip. And I do believe that I once read about a foreign visitor in America who met a sad end for not knowing the non-literal meaning of the word "freeze". Even so, you don't have to duck even if somebody yells "Shotgun!" or be afraid even if Home And Garden is going to come shoot you later.
Translation errors that come from the lack of cultural knowledge are occasionally more amusing. For example, guessing that a "Diaper Genie" is a baby prodigy. I remember one cop show in which some young man had been shot and killed on the street, and his mom had warned him not to walk through the projects. In the subtitles, this warning had something to do with the dangers of walking through a construction site. Another time, when a crazy woman rambled about her kid (who was nowhere to be seen), and the detective commented to another one that it's probably some milk carton kid she had kidnapped from some supermarket, in the subtitles this kid had become a human-shaped cardboard stand.
I haven't actually checked out this site since leaving the old country, so it might be interesting to see what the translators have achieved since then! Apparently, in the theme song of Family Guy, the father's name is "Lucky". Well, that should certainly make us effin' cry. In SNL (which seems to be a source for quite a few mistranslations), I guess that in certain sense, Bill Clinton really could have been the "forty-second president", so we can't quite fire the translator for that one, if it was translated from audio.
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