MovieChat Forums > Gegen die Wand (2004) Discussion > Subtitles?

Subtitles?

posted 18 years ago by a_skwara
5 replies | jump to latest

I was just wondering if any other German speakers have seen this movie with English subtitles? I just saw it, and love it, and want to recommend it to all my American friends. But I alredy told my best one to wait and see it with me. I am bilingual in German and English, and bought the German DVD and I am really having a hard time imagining how they would do the subtitles for this one.... (How to translate "Kanak" for example?) There is so much slang, and then there is the whole German/Turkish thing. When the characters use German as opposed to Turksh is so important to the movie, and I realized that for people with no knowledge of either language it´s probably really hard or impossible to distniguish. Personally I would do something like white/yellow or regular/italic subtitles to let people know, but I am fairly sure this is not the case. The title thread sort of alluded to this fact, even in the best of cases, subtitles always get it not quite right, and I am worried....

The problem is that in German there are so many things that have double meanings: for example, the scene where Cahit asks his brother-in-law and friends, why don´t they ever sleep with their "Frauen" -- in German this can mean wives or women, personally, I think he meant Turkish women in general, but I heard in the subtitles it is translatd as wives.... etc, etc...

[–] smitstachowski 18 years ago

I'm also bilingual but my DVD unfortunately does not have English subs. Subtitling is often a matter of the translator - you'd need someone with 'spitzengefühl' - that special knack of knowing how to translate the slang.
I can't wait to have it with English subs so my husband can also watch it and enjoy it as much as I do:)

[–] 18 years ago

[deleted]

[–] dropkickstein 17 years ago

I just watched this movie as part of my German class on the Turks living in Germany and this version had the English subtitles. I have been learning German for 6 years in school, but sometimes when I watch movies I do not really get what is going on because the actors speak so quickly and most of the time they speak with accents that are too difficult for me to understand. Therefore I cannot tell you if the translation was correct, but it did communicate the story correctly. (At least the main story.) I can say this because we had to discuss the film and the teacher seemed to think that we understood what was going on. She should be able to tell because she is Turkish and a professor of German.
I will say that for someone who does not know German, it would be very hard to tell when the actors were speaking Turkish and when the actors were speaking German. I almost had trouble sometimes because I got so into reading the subtitles.
However, I think that the message of this film is important and even if people have to see it with English subtitles, it is worth it. I learned a lot from this film and so will anyone else who is uneducated about the German-Turkish culture.

[–] alkarania 17 years ago

I saw this movie with English subtitles. Having never studied German or Turkish, they don't sound different enough to me to tell when they were speaking one or the other (apart from recognizing the occasional German word like frau, bitte, stadt, etc.) I wish they could have somehow let us know which language was being spoken, apart from the obvious brief switch to English at the end. That said, a really excellent film, but I feel like I missed something.

[–] london777 7 years ago

My DVD has English subtitles. I speak enough German to know which language they were speaking, but I am sure I missed a lot of meaning, humor, and cultural references by relying on subtitles.

The subtitles were extremely poor quality. Probably the worst in my whole DVD collection. Surely they could have found a native English speaker to tidy up the translations? There were numerous spelling and grammatical errors.

I have usually have the ability to read subtitles without missing anything on the screen, but in cases like this I have to keep rewinding and revisiting scenes to make sure I had missed nothing.