jueves, 28 de agosto de 2014

Translation of movie titles

Hello!

Have you ever thought about the translation of movie titles of a foreign film? Often, the translation matches the title of the original language, many others aren't similar, or even it wasn't translate.

This happens because it must not only translate the title from one language to another, but also it has to take into account the marketing and advertising. Therefore, translators don't use to translate the movie titles. Maybe they suggest a title, but they don't make the decision.

Perhaps the title will not attract the target audience in the same way it does in its home country, and he has to adapt it. Maybe, there are titles more successful than others, but don't just think that the translation is wrong or that a random decision is taken.

According to the film or the public, it will opt for one or another solution. It can also be used as title, something relevant that happen in the film. Now I show you some examples, with the original movie poster and the Spanish translation (I speak only of the titles that have been translated into Spanish, because in other countries may have taken other translation decisions).



Equivalence between title and translation: 















Adaptation:



Conservation of the original title:









sábado, 23 de agosto de 2014

Translator's notes

I have always heard that a good translation is one that doesn't seem that is a translation. However, sometimes the translator subtly appears when he believes that the reader will need more information than that the original gives. I speak of the translator's notes.

Some people think that translators should not use footnotes because they interrupt the reading. Or even that the translator who use it, hasn't done his job well because he hasn't been able to translate something and so he resorted to this note. Obviously, not all footnotes are necessary, but in some cases I think they are very useful, for the fact that the reader can ignore some concepts (usually by cultural differences). And if we have a curious reader, he may also interrupt the reading to understand and discover about the idea. Or in the worst case, the reader simply won't understand it.

It is also not good the abuse of footnotes, at least in the case of literary translation. In this case, we have a pleasure reading in which the reader is introduced to the world created by the author and a footnote would take him away from this world. However, in other texts (educational, scientific...), it is more common to use footnotes, which you can refer, for example, to reference sources.

As readers, what do you think about translator's notes? Do you think they are useful or are a nuisance?

And as translators, do you use it if you think they are necessary or do you believe that they are a sign of incompetence?

sábado, 16 de agosto de 2014

Literary translation: what should we translate?

Hello everybody!

Today I want you to think about a very common issue in the translation of texts, specifically applied to literary translation. What should we translate and what not? The following image belongs to a fragment from the book Celia lo que dice, a serie of children's books that tell the story of Celia, a seven years old girl, written by Elena Fortún. 



This text was proposed in class to be translated from spanish into german. I have scanned this particular part because appears a racist phrase said by Celia to a black man («Qué no es nada, Dalila. Es un pobrecito negro que está esperando a su amo» > “It's nothing, Dalila. It is a black poor fellow who is waiting for his master”). In class it was suggested not to translate that sentence, that is, remove it in the target text, because the book is aimed primarily at children and we should not transmit them this type of negative values. I personally think that we should translate it for several reasons:

1. This book was published in 1928. In writing, the author was reflecting a reality of the time, perhaps by way of information about the society or as a critique of racism, because the commentary it is made by a little girl, possibly influenced by what is happening around her and what think the people around her.

2. Us as translators, should not care what it is said in a text, that is, it should care how it is said (in this case, the language of a seven years old girl), because our task is to write it in another language, but not to change the content based on our personal opinions and values. The author wrote her book as she wanted. Who are we to decide what we transmit to the target reader? (By this I don't mean not to improve the text, clarify ideas that may be confusing or make explanations about things that our readers might not understand in their culture. I mean this kind of moral issues that may influence or to go against our values).

3. To our target reader, in this case children, we don't want that they learn this kind of negative values, such as racism, but the opposite: tolerance. However, we don't have influence in the child who decides to read this book or parents who decide to buy it. I think that if a child reads this sentence and asks his parents why that behavior towards black men, they should explain it. I think the best way to educate is not hiding things, but explaining it. It is essential to know what racism is to fight it.

What do you think?


sábado, 9 de agosto de 2014

Setting subtitles: Any Video Converter

Hi!

Today I'm going to explain you how to set subtitles on a video. Once you have subtitled a video, you can set the subtitles, that way, every time you reproduce the video, the subtitles will always appear on it. If you don't set it, you will able to open the video with or without the subtitles. The program we are going to use is Any Video Converter. You can download it here and don't forget to install Wine if you use Linux.


Setting subtitles with Any Video Converter is very easy. You have to click on “add video” and select it. I'm going to use the same example as in the post of subtitling. 


In the image above, it will appear the selected video. In purple, you can see that, by the moment, the video has any subtitles. You must click on it, then in “add subtitles” and select the file that the program will set.



And now, in the blue square above the selected video, on the right side, you only have to click and convert!

If you want to choose an specific file in which the video with the set subtitles will be saved, for example mp4, you only have to open the pull-down menu right next to the blue square.

sábado, 2 de agosto de 2014

Video edition: VirtualDub

Hi!

As I told you days ago in my post about subtitling, I’m going to explain you how to edit videos with the program VirtualDub. Specially, I’ll show you how to use the program to cut a fragment of a video. First of all, you can download the program here, and if you use Linux as I do, don’t forget to install Wine, because VirtualDub is a Windows program. And to use it, you will need too the video and audio codecs, that you can install here.



Once you have installed everything, you will open the video you want to edit, in AVI format, clicking on “file” and “open video file”. It will appear two windows with an image of the video, and below there is a grey bar, which is the duration of the video, and the buttons that we will use to select the scene we want to cut. The scene that I have chosen is the first minutes of the spanish film 8 apellidos vascos. I take advantage of this video to show you their peculiarity: the scene is recorded with an audio-description for blind people, that mean that between the dialogs and the breaks, a narrator describes the scene. That way, the blind people can imagine where the scene is and which the context is.



With the buttons below, in the following picture are marked in red and blue, you will select the beginning and the end of the chosen scene. With the square over the grey bar you can move the video quickly, and with the buttons below you will move frame by frame. Once you have selected the fragment, marked in blue over the grey bar, you must save the file in “file” and “save as AVI”. The program will start to cut the video. Finished the process, the edited video will be saved in the folder you have selected before.





And here I show you the result of the video edition: