This gem comes from Love In Simla and is the kind of thing that would happen were I subtitling an English film into Hindi.
More subtitle fun
10 Comments to “More subtitle fun”
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Hilarious. Understandable, though. What could the translation be? ‘Hey! My father, hey!’ And what sense would that make? :)
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:-) Sometimes, subtitles aren’t really even necessary. Like when the characters are already speaking English!
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I quite like it when they subtitle the “arre”s. Or maybe I just like “arre” as a word. ARRE, YAAR!
I love when characters speak English and it’s subtitled… incorrectly.
Or the most recent experience which I’ve been having in the cinema: subtitles for silence. Recently – e.g. during Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic – there will be silent scenes, and the subtitles will carry on subtitling with a mind of their own. What’s even more odd is that the subtitles seem to be subtitling what could have been said – i.e. they’re logical, in the context – which makes me think that they’re writing their subtitles up from a final draft of the script, but not checking them against the shooting script.
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Love In Simla had many English language scenes and they were all subtitled—but correctly! The rest of it was a mess though. And actually, in the scenes here there was just a bunch of shouting, and I couldn’t really make out anybody actually saying Arre Baap Re! I think it was just made up.
Interesting re: Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic…was it distracting and horrible? Or kind of fun?
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Interesting re: Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic…was it distracting and horrible? Or kind of fun?
Kind of all three at the same time. It’s certainly a new weird form of subtitle fun; I think I noticed it on Om Shanti Om too… but only in the theatres! The DVD is fine. A mystery.
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My nephew recently saw a subtitled version of Race – and reported a scene where somebody says something about two people being like `Ram and Laxman’. The subtitle read: `They’re like Humpty and Dumpty’.
What the -!! -
ppcc: do we really NEED more forms of subtitle fun? :-)
madhu: that is one of my pet peeves, like translating Laila and Majnu into Romeo and Juliet. And Humpty and Dumpty have to be a new low!
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The mystery-subtitles when nobody is talking happen all the time in new releases. I think it must be because they’re working from a shooting script. I don’t mind too much, but it might be distracting for somebody with no clue about Hindi – although what that person would be doing in a Bollywood movie screening I don’t know…
I prefer the “yaar” and “arre” subtitles to when the subtitles are Anglocized. There is nothing worse than watching a movie and seeing every “yaar” translated to “buddy” or “friend” or something.
The Humpty/Dumpty and Laila/Manju thing is very funny. That reminds me of the “Roadside Romeo” trailer where the famous lines from “Deewar” and “Sholay” were subtitled as lines from famous American films. I didn’t approve of that at all.
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PS I’ll be in Boston on Thursday if you’d like to get coffee or something. :)
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I agree with Madhu. Race is actually the worst subtitled film ever. Just watched it last night and I was laughing out loud reading some of the subtitles. They spelled Humpty Dumpty as Humty Dumty. :P
