I only understand English, but I’ve had similar experiences watching non-English films with people who do understand the spoken language, who have afterwards commented on the subtitles occasionally being remarkably different to the spoken words.
I think subtitle authors frequently go more for the general sense of a speech than for specific details, purely in order to compress it to an amount of text which can reliably be read by an audience who is having to divide their attention between the subtitles and the picture.
Arbitrarily changing the sense of something would be quite perplexing, but I think in this example the general sense is maintained even if the way it is expressed is a bit different.
I agree that subtitles and dubbing have significant constraints that the translators have to work with, and I know that work is challenging. This particular example jumped out at me because I think my own translation, with a little polish, is both more faithful and better than the one they went with. It looks to me like someone decided an English audience wouldn’t follow the numbers used, and put two and two together (sorry), which I found very funny.
I’ve only seen that once, and when I started watching it, well into the evening, I didn’t realise I’d embarked upon a 3.5 hour film :)
I’ve only seen a half-dozen of Kurosawa’s films, but my favourite is Ran (possibly followed by Throne of Blood so I guess I particularly enjoy his translations of Shakespeare).
I usually have a very good memory for paraphrasing quotations. I don’t remember many things correctly, but I usually remember them rather close to correctly.
I honestly don’t recall the specific quotation numbers. The ones I wrote were off the top of my head.
Especially in the past they usually translated movie titles into German. The translations are often funny or interesting. One example off the top of my head is Home Alone which transformed into “Kevin allein zu Haus” (English: Kevin home alone).
A rather silly example is Liam Neeson’s movie Taken. Its title was changed into “96 hours” (a reference to the 96 hours you have to find an abductee before they completely disappear) and yes they changed the English title into another English title. I guess, one could argue that the English words 96 hours are easier to understand than taken but to me it seems very silly.
Another funny example (the older the movies the more you can find): Leslie Nielsen’s Airplane! which got changed to “Die unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug” (translated: The unbelievable journey in a crazy airplane). I wonder who came up with that title.
In the end I watched Leave the World Behind, which I enjoyed more than I expected, if a tad predictable.
What I enjoyed more is the little tabs of information that everybody keeps from each other making everything fit when shared. That and the random potluck (Let’s go for the day to an AirBnB!!) that could mean the difference between life and death on situations like that.
We also finished The Mask (I still love that dog), and last night we watched Rebel Moon. Predictable but enjoyable. Seems like a sci-fi tribute to Seven Samurai (or Magnificent Seven) with enjoyable enough action scenes and effects, and a decent job for Ed Skrein as the baddie (although I think he might be typecasting himself in these kind of roles, like he did for Alita - Battle Angel).
After that, I finished late with the Arnold last two episodes of his Netflix documentary. Now I need to watch the one on Sly. If anything, they don’t even mention Total Recall amongst his movies…
We are finally watching The Orville after several people recommended it to us. I thought it was supposed to be a parody of Star Trek. Instead it‘s just one where spaceships look like sex-toys (I have no idea what kind that would be but it‘s all I can think whenever the Orville is in the frame) and everything is a bit more shiny. But otherwise I cannot detect any parody whatsoever (well maybe a little, but it‘s subtle). I think Seth MacFarlane just wanted to be Picard and the Star Trek folks didn‘t hire him so he decided to make his own Trek and call it satire to avoid lawsuits.
The impression I got from season 1 is pretty much that - some crude humour in the pilot so that the executives would say “OK, comedy, that’s marketable, do it” and the the rest of the season pretty much played it straight. I mean, the idea that the bridge crew aren’t perfect tin gods but people with their own lives and interests and flaws was certainly undone by Next Generation…
I finished out my vacation viewing with what turned out to be an A24-fest:
Hereditary: Too many drawn-out scenes in the first half and the gonzo denoument wasn’t foreshadowed well and was rushed. It needed to either stick with its somber, subdued tone or play into the supernatural and cult activity more.
Midsommar: Same writer/director. Had better pace and consistency throughout. Still long and the prelude could have been trimmed, but it didn’t feel long.
The Green Knight I liked the plot and story beats and even the dreamlike qualities, marred by logical inconsistencies were just supposed to accept. Lost item in sequence A, get it back in sequence C through a completely unrelated and disconnected series of events that had nothing to do with what happened in A (or the parties involved) and then do it again in sequence D with a different item.
I also cleared Curse of the Demon (not A24, but classic supernatural thiller) from my DVR. It was off broadcast TV and had a cheesy, trying-to-be-funny horror host doing bits and commentary during the breaks that I could not fast forward fast enough through.
It shows its age and does some silly things (like the visit to Stonehenge), but it’s really interesting in that the audience knows who the bad guy is and what is going on while we watch the protagonist figure his way through it.
Just finished watching Red Rose on Netflix.
Here is what I thought at the end of each episode.
Interesting. Teenagers are terrible.
I was not expecting that; good on them. Teenagers are terrible.
Oh, I think I get it. Teenagers are really terrible.
This seems fairly obvious. It should be an extended Black Mirror episode. Teenagers are terrible.
Teenagers are the worst. Do real teenagers act like this? I know I an my friends didn’t; I was never invited to the cool parties. Granted, i would have hated them.
Oh, maybe it’s not what I thought it was… but dumber.
Yep, confirmed. Dumb.
That was a waste of time. At least I stopped thinking about teenagers.
Red Rose is one of those shows that has 100% critics review and 55% audience review on Rotten Tomatoes. Normally, you might ascribe that an “artsy” film or something similar that the general public doesn’t get. In this case, I think the critics give it more credit than it deserves. It is also one of the stories where the big reveal of what is really going on and who/what the monster is diminishes what came before.