Subtitling dialects (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Subtitling dialects
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Medulin
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Message 33 of 39

13 September 2012 at 1:48am | IP Logged

mashmusic11235 wrote:

In America at least, UK English is rarely subtitled, unless, again, the person is
speaking with a thick Scottish or Welsh accent.

Nadine Coyle is neither Scottish or Welsh but she was subtitled on the Tyra Banks' show ;)
She's from Northern Ireland:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JS5w22IwA4

Cheryl Cole didn't get hired last year, as a judge on the American Idol since the producers thought Americans could not understand her.

Only 3% of British people speak with the RP accent (according to the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language). This means, 97% of Britons are subtitlable in the US.

When the prime minister of Australia visited the USA, some children asked her what language was spoken in Australia (since they couldn't understand her accent/dialect)...

---
As for different languages:
Norwegian state TV (NRK) sutbitles Swedish and Danish,
but the private TV2 does not ;)
I guess it has to do with some regulations.

Serbian is never subtitled on Croatian TV.
Some nationalists were trying to push the law according to which Serbian should be subtitled on Croatian tv, and even RTL TV was fined for showing a Serbian movie without subtitles, but now the TV stations are defending themselves mentioning the law according to which movies in the languages of ethnic minorities of Croatia (Italian, Serbian, Albanian, Czech, Bosnian) can be shown on state TV channels without subtitling . ;)

Edited by Medulin on 13 September 2012 at 2:09am
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Serpent
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Message 34 of 39

13 September 2012 at 2:25am | IP Logged

Random review wrote:

Serpent wrote:

As for "nightmare", hm... Bear in mind that it's one-sided. Brazilians
often really can't understand Continental Portuguese, but most people from Portugal
understand the Brazilian variant just fine.

Well, yes, I know they watch Brazilian soap operas etc and until reading this thread I
thought it was a one-sided problem too, but (in the light of your information above) if they're translating Brazilian authors in Portugal, then the problem is not one-sided.

... (I repeat) something is always lost in any translation, however good.

The thing is that people CAN read Brazilian authors in the original. And I think more is lost if a Lusophone tries to read in a less familiar variant (not dialect) of Portuguese, regardless of which one he/she speaks. These are not real translations but just edits. Editors do get their hands on the text after the author regardless of whether they're polishing before printing or actually adapting the text for a different country. Changing a word here and there still leaves most of the text intact, and any significant edits will be agreed with the author. (in the case with Paulo Coelho, I sure hope he also gets to read the adaptations before they are published)

Edited by Serpent on 13 September 2012 at 2:26am
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Medulin
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Message 35 of 39

13 September 2012 at 2:27am | IP Logged

Random review wrote:

we use footnotes!

But, the differences between Paulo Coelho's original Brazilian Portuguese text of The Alquimist and the Portuguese translation/adaptations are not really lexical, but syntactical. So, footnotes don't really work when the grammar is concerned.

''a velha segurava suas mãos.'' (original in Brazilian Portuguese)
the old women was holding her hands

''a velha segurava-lhe as mãos.'' (Continental adaptation)
the old woman was holding hands to her

– Não vou lhe cobrar nada agora – disse a velha. Mas quero um décimo do tesouro, se você encontrá-lo. (Brazilian original)

– Não te vou cobrar nada agora - disse a velha. - Mas quero um décimo do tesouro, se o encontrares. (Continental Portuguese adaptation)

''não vou LHE cobrar '' was changed to ''não TE vou cobrar'' (different pronouns and different position of the pronoun)
''se VOCÊ ENCONTRÁ-LO'' was changed ''se O ENCONTRARES'' different subject pronoun, and different position of the object pronoun)

To Portuguese readers, the Brazilian original usage would scream as ''bad grammar'', and they would focus more on the form than on the content of the book, that's why Brazilian authors are adapted/translated in Portugal (the grammar is changed and the words too). It's not that they cannot understand the original, but the style of language used makes them revolted/disguised. Portuguese people are only okay with reading the formal Brazilian Portuguese (used in right wing political magazines like VEJA, which reflects the 19th continental Portuguese syntax and not the contemporary spoken Brazilian Portuguese used by modern Brazilian writers). They consider the colloquial Brazilian Portuguese something which should never appear in a written text (so, they advocate the diglossia: Brazilian should write according to the 19th Continental Portuguese rules, and should never ever try writing the way they/Brazilians really speak).

But in Brazil, the situation is like this:

spoken language (songs, tv, movies) and modern writers use modern colloquial Brazilian Portuguese

newspapers, textbooks, political magazines and translated books use 19th century Continental Portuguese grammar (only the spelling is modernized, but the grammar got stuck in the past at the moment Brazil separated from Portugal).

Edited by Medulin on 13 September 2012 at 2:33am
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QiuJP
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Message 36 of 39

13 September 2012 at 5:27pm | IP Logged

Random review wrote:

I made several friends from Singapore at uni, none of whom
wanted to go back when they
finished their studies (over a decade ago), precisely because they couldn't criticize
their government. They all ended up having to go back.
Now I can't speak for anyone else on here, but when you say this (it doesn't sound that
friendly to me b.t.w.)....

QiuJP wrote:

As a friendly advice to you, I will urge you not to speak your sentiments
(about the policies) out loud if you visit Singapore. You could be branded as an
extremist which allows the government to detain you for 2 years without triad.

...you make it very difficult (at least for me) to do what you ask here:

QiuJP wrote:

Please look at the point of view of the government: we were a colony make
up of immigrants from different background and we need ways to make people royal to the
new state.

Besides, few people are rude enought to go to a country and start criticising its
government straight away and I doubt Ari would be any exception. He was making a
comment about the minority language policy of certain governments on a language
related forum, which I think is legitimate.

Edit: sorry if that seems rude, there's a lot of great things about Singapore and the
best friend I ever had is from there (I still remember some of the swear words!), but I
got really upset by that comment about the Singapore government throwing Ari in jail
for two years without trial as I find that kind of arbitrary power extremely
frightening in any hands and the way you put it (I'm guessing unintentionally) made it
sound like a threat to my ears. I've calmed down a bit since writing the above, but I'm
still so upset I'm actually shaking even now.

It was not my intention to scare, but there have been cases in the eighties where good
people have been thrown to jail in these circumstances, just because the government
view them as threat to society. Language(and race) policy is considered to be one of
the building blocks of society, and any remarks like Ari's could be viewed as
attempting to soil discord among the races.

If I did not remember wrongly, in 2006, when Singapore held the IMF meeting, there was
almost no protests,unlike in other cities. That was because, the authorities actually
obtained a list of potential troublemakers and stopped them from entering the country.
The small protest was marked by the fact that there were more police officers than
protesters. This shows how much the government will do in order to keep things in
order.

The power to arrest people and lock them up for at least 2 years is the dark side of
Singapore that many visitors do not know about: our success is build on brutal methods
and policies which are authoritarian in natural

Let's stop talking about this issue, as it is political and is derailing from the topic
and language learning.
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Medulin
Tetraglot
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Message 37 of 39

13 September 2012 at 8:06pm | IP Logged

If Singapore people really cared about language diversity they would learn Tamil and Malay too and not Chinese and English only.

In Switzerland most people speak German, French and Italian (as well as English which is not official). More Swiss people whose mother tongue is not Italian learn Italian, than nonTamilian-speaking Singaporeans learn Tamil.

It seems that Singapore is multilingual only in theory. In real life, it's only bilingual (Mandarin + English) and Tamil and Malay are repressed. But Tamil and Malay came to Singapore much earlier than Mandarin and English. Don't they deserve respect?

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Random review
Diglot
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Message 38 of 39

14 September 2012 at 1:29am | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

And I think more is lost if a Lusophone tries
to read in a less familiar variant (not dialect) of Portuguese, regardless of which one
he/she
speaks. These are not real translations but just edits. Editors do get their hands on
the text
after the author regardless of whether they're polishing before printing or actually
adapting the text for a different country. Changing a word here and there still leaves
most of the text intact, and any significant edits will be agreed with the author. (in
the case with Paulo Coelho, I sure hope he also gets to read the adaptations before
they are published)

I never looked at it that way. You may well have a point.

Medulin wrote:

OK, I think you're probably right. Every day's a school day.

Medulin wrote:

To Portuguese readers, the Brazilian original usage would scream as
''bad grammar'', and they would focus more on the form than on the content of the book,
that's why Brazilian authors are adapted/translated in Portugal (the grammar is changed
and the words too). It's not that they cannot understand the original, but the style of
language used makes them revolted/disguised. Portuguese people are only okay with
reading the formal Brazilian Portuguese (used in right wing political magazines like
VEJA, which reflects the 19th continental Portuguese syntax and not the contemporary
spoken Brazilian Portuguese used by modern Brazilian writers). They consider the
colloquial Brazilian Portuguese something which should never appear in a written text..

I'm surprised to hear this, as the Portuguese people I have met were not at all like
that. If that attitude really is widespread in Portugal then that country just went
down in my estimation.

Personally I love the fact that in modern Spain you can have Argentinian actors playing
Argentinian characters in Spanish TV series using the "vos" conjugation of the verb and
other Argentinian grammar like recién + preterite quite naturally and I'm not aware of
any editors changing vos to tú in Spanish editions of books authored by Argentinians;
but of course the situation in the lusophone world is a totally different one. Guess
I'll just have to learn both varieties of Portuguese, then. :-(
Edit: to be fair it just occurred to me that I once heard a Latin American audiobook
version of a Harry Potter book which used the European Spanish translation except for
changing the odd word here and there and systematically replacing every instance of
vosotr@s with Uds and every instance of "coger" with an appropriate replacement for
that context. I didn't feel I was listening to a different translation and that
something had been lost. Maybe I've been making to big a deal of this. I mean, even
here I think you can find editions of US works with UK spelling. But I'd still hate it
if they ever started dubbing US shows here!

QiuJP wrote:

Let's stop talking about this issue, as it is political and is derailing
from the topic and language learning.

+1

Edited by Random review on 14 September 2012 at 1:46am
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QiuJP
Triglot
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Message 39 of 39

14 September 2012 at 5:35pm | IP Logged

Medulin wrote:

If Singapore people really cared about language diversity they would
learn Tamil and Malay too and not Chinese and English only.

In Switzerland most people speak German, French and Italian (as well as English which
is not official). More Swiss people whose mother tongue is not Italian learn Italian,
than nonTamilian-speaking Singaporeans learn Tamil.

It seems that Singapore is multilingual only in theory. In real life, it's only
bilingual (Mandarin + English) and Tamil and Malay are repressed. But Tamil and Malay
came to Singapore much earlier than Mandarin and English. Don't they deserve respect?

First of all, all 4 languages are official and you can get newspaper, books, radio and
television emission in Singapore.

The answer to your question that is people do not see the economic value in learning
Tamil or Malay. And it is made worse for the fact that the natives speakers would
rather learn more English, than promoting their language. The main driving force for
this trend is that very few books or research papers are published in Malay or Tamil in
the following areas: Engineering, science, IT , banking, psychology etc. This trend has
limited the use of these languages in schools and then society in general. The
languages you mentioned in Switzerland, have well established tradition in publishing
large amounts of books and research paper in these "valuable economic areas", which
people felt worthwhile in learning them.

The trend I mentioned here does not only applies to Singapore; it also applies to
countries such as Malaysia and India (which is well known for using English in high
technological fields, rather than Hindi or other Indian languages)

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