I have a Problem with the Subtitling of Foreign Films

Oh yeah and 1 hour and 3 minutes into the film, a 3 metre wide terrace reads "3 feet".... big difference if you ask me.

As a subtitle translator of French films, I can help you out here.

I agree entirely on the Americanisation of the language (though it's ironic you spelled that word in the American way!). The use of 'baseball bats' is a good example.

However, measurements are another matter. In the UK we use miles, yards, feet, etc. We are all supposed to understand metric measurements as well, but in reality we don't. Kilometres really don't mean much to British people. So the use of miles has nothing to do with Americanisation.

Also, you're forgetting about space and time constraints:

Space - the text has to be short: 'miles' is much shorter than 'kilometres'. It may not seem a great deal but every letter is crucial.

Time - in exchanges of dialogue, the text has to move rapidly onto the next speaker.

On top of that the subtitles have to correspond to the images on the screen. Imagine a character laughing when the subtitle hasn't yet translated the joke!

The translator in this case must have decided that the exact number of kilometers was not crucial to the story. Therefore '7 miles' was acceptable.
Ditto your other example for '3 feet'. If, say, a character said that his house was '7.45 kilometers' from somewhere, the translation would have to reflect this precision.

I agree wholeheartedly that too many subtitles use silly Americanisms - 'La Haine' is a good (or rather bad) example, as it was done by two Americans using dated street slang ('swell', 'jerk', etc.).

However, subtitles are constantly criticised by people who have not even the slightest clue of what goes into translating them. There are a whole host of constraints that do not apply to literary translation.

Yeah I agree totally (including the measurements not being changed). But I could've overlooked the measurement changes, but the "kleenex" bit just pushed me over the edge. In Ireland, you would NEVER hear someone use it as a generic word (or I certainly haven't) and I'm quite certain you wouldn't in the UK either.

And somehow I think that since the education system is metric only (AFAIK) younger Britons should have no issues with 7 km or 3 m. And even if they did have issues, as was said - the precise length was immaterial, so the way I see it, there was still no need to change it.

Personally, I like subtitles to show some adaptation to my culture. Let's take the example of km vs miles; even if the exact distance is irrelevant to the plot, giving the length in miles is distracting to me because I wouldn't think of giving a distance in miles in my first language, I'd talk in km (but I expect the numbers to be different, of course, else it's also distracting).
It's even worse if the numbers are actually relevant to the plot. I remember a car race scene with an emphasis on speed, in which the speed was given in miles per hour, which made it difficult to understand. Or I recently watched a subtitled episode of "House, MD" in which the body temperature of the patient had some importance. The temperatures were all given in degrees Fahrenheit (they didn't convert them), making it almost incomprehensible to a viewer who usually thinks of a body temperature as in degrees Celsius.
Similarly, when there is a reference to popular culture that one would expect to be completely obscure in the viewer's own culture, I expect the translator to find the closest equivalent (eg most French people wouldn't understand a joke about Oprah's weight variations).


To answer your question: yes, at least 90% of people in France would know what a baseball bat is and what it looks like (but few people would actually have an idea of the rules of baseball)

Not to take away from the overall point being made, but I am in the middle of watching the film on DVD, and I came across this thread just after having seen the scene in question. In fact, in the French dialog Lolita says the party "is not very far, well, 10 kilometers." So, to my mind, the translation as 7 miles is close enough.

Sadly, subtitle translators are more often than not given a brief to favour American English rather than British English. This is for simply financial reasons: the makers of the film are seeking to market it in the US and the UK, not to mention other English-speaking countries. They also know that American English is likely to be understood more widely than British English, so this is what they favour.

It's true that people who complain about subtitles are usually entirely ignorant of how they are made. Someone complained to me recently about numbers being 'wrong' in a film - the character said to a policeman 'I was only doing 60' (meaning kph). To translate this as '60' for English speakers means '60 miles per hour' and the meaning is changed drastically, as 60mph is much faster than 60kph. Therefore the speed has to be converted. What suprises me is how often people think subtitlers would go through an extremely long, specialised process making such basic mistakes. Who do they think translates subtitles? They are specialist teams with years of translation experience and knowledge of films. Yet I still hear people saying 'oh the subtitles were terrible', when they have no knowledge of a) the language or, more likely b) translation.

I also hate the pop-ups that TV channels use to advertise their programs. The pop-ups always cover up the sub-title so I don't know what is being said, poor translation or not. Nuts to IFC for this practice.

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