How Translation Works, Book Title Edition
7 comments
·February 3, 2025krisoft
laurieg
I love catching these little translation flubs. Japanese movie and TV subtitles seem to have quite a few, probably because of the aforementioned time pressure. For example, I saw Oppenheimer in the theater and "crown" had been mistranslated as "clown".
Perhaps my favorite subtitle mistake of all time is in the subtitles of Brooklyn 99. One of the characters talks about getting someone a "boogie board" (a small surfboard) as a present. This is translated as "electronic memo pad". I couldn't work out how that had happened until I googled "boogie board" and half of the results are for an electronic writing pad with that name.
lmm
You might enjoy the notorious Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West. At turns ludicrous and oddly poetic.
jszymborski
I know it got a lot of praise, but I couldn't help but feel the English translation of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a bit awkward. Among the instances I distinctly remember, the phrase "boy toy" was used in some fairly awkward ways. While the awkwardness might be intentional or a failing of the original author, it accompanied some very alien-sounding prose that always made me feel it was a product of the translation.
RheingoldRiver
This is the only thing I think of now when I hear "that's amore" - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/science/moray-eels-eat-la...
tkgally
This is a nice essay, with an excellent example of the challenges and art of literary translation. But the author seems to assume that "computer translation" is limited to services like Google Translate or DeepL: put in a text, get a translation, with no consideration of the context or purpose. Properly prompted LLMs yield much better results and are already helping human translators produce better translations than they could on their own. Whether a completely automated workflow is possible for translating literary texts in an artful and engaging way—I don't know. But I wouldn't reject that possibility out of hand.
Addendum: The above comment has received at least two up votes and two down votes: in the hour after I posted it, I saw it go from 1 point to 3 points and back to 1. Perhaps people who disapprove of it could say why?
IsaacZerh
"Common phrases in one language don’t exist in another; cultural references in one country mean nothing elsewhere, and so on. This is why a computerized translation is fine for a bland business email but will utterly fail for a novel."
I'm sure it's going to be indistinguishable very soon, if not already.
That being sad human translators are very often under imense time pressure and that sadly leaves a mark on the translations.
To stay with hungarian example: in the original of Fifty Shades Of Grey Christian is a big fan of the band Kings of Leon. Somehow the translator managed to translate the band name as Lion King. Which drastically changed the vibe of some scenes. Most probably the translator wasn’t familiar with the band and had to translate it super fast.
Similarly in the hungarian translation of Harry Potter Slytherin's Locket was translated as Slytherin's Lock. And when in the next book the context made it clear that indeed we are talking about a locket not a lock they just changed the name of the item like nothing happened. :)