However, for me one scene really stood out as a glaring example of the difficulty of subtitles: the scene where the girl is conjugating an irregular verb on the blackboard. In the film it's perfectly obvious to a French speaker that the verb is "croire", which means "to believe", but in the subtitles the verb is "to swim" - the kids keep having a go at words like "swammed", "swummed", etc. I found this very distracting, but I don't see how they could have been totally faithful to the original, since "believe" is a regular verb in English but an irregular one in French.
I thought that the verb was "croître" (to grow, or to increase in size), rather than "croire" (to believe). While the girl was trying to write the conjugation of the present indicative on the blackboard, there was a
circonflexe over the "i" in the third person singular.
The girl did the singular part of the conjugation right, but did the plural part wrong. The correct conjugation of
croître in the present indicative is: je crois, tu crois, il croît, nous croissons, vous croissez, ils croissent.
The girl wrote: je crois, tu crois, il croît, nous croitons, vous croitrez, ils croitrent (and, in the third person plural, she squeezed the "r" between the "t" and the "e" after she had written the word).
One of the students said that she was getting it wrong because she thought that it was "a regular verb."
Toward the end of the scene, one of the students said "croissons" (the correct first person plural of
croître), and that statement was not subtitled.
I was also baffled by the use of "swammed," "swemmed," etc. in the subtitles, since the French word for "swim" is totally different (
nager). I suppose that the idea was to convey the effect of a student incorrectly conjugating an irregular verb, and the translator did not think that could be done with "grow," though I don't know why.
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