Lifestyle / Hot Pot Column

Comedy of errors found in translation

By Raymond Zhou ( China Daily ) Updated: 2007-01-05 21:31:15

China's pirate disk manufacturers are a diligent lot. Not only do they churn out the latest blockbusters, but they also often include subtitles that add a whole new dimension to the word "creativity."

The most outrageous example is Minority Report when it first came out in 2002. The counterfeiter, in an effort to woo more buyers, had put in an extra soundtrack for the Chinese translation that removed all the sound effects. One man and one woman played all the characters and did not try to vary their voices.

I was not surprised at the bad translation until Tom Cruise shouted to Samantha Morton. The English is "Run," and the Chinese became "I love you!" By then I began to doubt whether the translator knew the 26 letters of the alphabet.

Subtitles in Chinese are mandatory, or nobody but expats will buy the disk. If the movie is older than about six months, it comes with the original subtitles, and the translator need only muster his reading skill. If he's any good, he may get about 50 per cent right.

I heard that, for cost control, the counterfeit producers, mostly based in the Pearl River Delta and funded with overseas money, hire college students and pay them 500-1,000 yuan (-128) per movie. That's in a market where a simultaneous translator commands 6,000-10,000 yuan (8-1,280) a day. So, it may be excusable that News on the March, a mini-documentary within Citizen Kane, became News in March in Chinese.

If the translator has to listen to the dialogue, things will get complicated. As most language students practice more reading than listening, trying to decipher lines from a typical Hollywood movie is tantamount to recreating it.

I can imagine the kid, eager to earn a few hundred yuan, sweating in front of the video screen. His supervisor may be standing by, and he cannot reveal that he did not catch a single complete sentence. So, he has to invent lines from the few words he does catch or from what's happening on the screen. Under these circumstances, he'd be lucky if he gets 10 per cent right.

Many years ago before Woody Allen made it big, he got a Japanese movie and, not knowing a single word of the original, put in an English soundtrack that is funny and fits the original image. What the counterfeiters do is just as creative. The only difference is, they don't bother to get the rights.

Recently, they have begun to toy with the original English. I noticed that the Chinese caption could be 80 per cent accurate, but the English caption does not correspond, yet is eerily similar, to what is spoken on the screen. One day, it dawned upon me that the English is decoded back from the Chinese translation and done with a software program.

When a character says "OK," the Chinese is "hao de," which then turns literally into "good of." Because the Chinese "de" also signals possession, the dictionary definition is "of." So, "wo de shu" (my book) can be machine rendered as "I of book."

Anyone who believes a movie can go from one language to another by the grace of a software programme must be out of his mind. The more common the speech is, as in movies, the more it needs human understanding. If you use a translation tool on the Internet, you can turn the most serious article into a comic piece as if Mark Twain had written it in a drunken daze.

Take the expression, "Come on!" It doesn't have a Chinese equivalent. Its meaning changes by the tone or context. It's very easy to understand for someone with a modicum of English, but a translation tool will throw up its arms and put in something ridiculous.

You think your omnipotent software can translate a movie? Come on!