Gained in Translation
“That’s not really what they said.”
I remember sitting in the back of film class laughing to myself at the inaccurate subtitles in French films. Obviously, I thought to myself, the rest of the class has lost so much in translation. But after three months of translating subtitles for Chinese films, I discovered that, in fact, “gained in translation” is really the appropriate phrase.
In the past few months, I learnt that subtitle translation must be inaccurate. And that’s specifically why Chinese-to-English script translators earn so much money (pay can vary anywhere from one month to a half a year’s New York standard salary), because they are basically rewriting the whole movie.
It doesn’t matter whether the Western audience understands precisely what is going on in a Chinese movie scene. What matters is that that scene has the same emotional impact on a Western audience as on its native Chinese audience. Translating meaning requires skill. Translating emotional impact requires something more.
very good!