Monday, June 1, 2009

Night at the Movies

31.5.09

So I went to a German movie and it was filled with translation opportunities. Before the movie there was an advertisement being played on the screen and I found it interesting that the advertisement on the screen was in German but it was being read in English.  I don’t understand why they did it that way.

Before the movie began, I was looking at the movies titles and how they differed from the original English titles.  The movie Maid of Honor, for example was translated as Verliebt in die Braut. While the title accurately describes the plot of the movie, it’s not very close to the English title. Another movie, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, was translated as Der Womanizer. Another failure in my opinion.  It gives the movie a sort of negative vibe that just isn’t there in the English title.

When the movie was playing, I relied on the German subtitles to understand the French conversations. Doing subtitling exercises last semester made me pay attention to the formatting of the subtitles in Illuminati. We had learned that there should be no more than 36 characters per line, including spacing and punctuation and that there could be no more than two lines at a time. The subtitles in Illuminati, were much more than 36 characters per line. Probably more than twice that amount. I had to physically move my eyes from left to right to read the lines rather than being able to see the whole line in one glance, which is how they are supposed to be formatted.  They most definitely did not fit the requirements of standardized subtitling.

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