Do we still need professional translators to subtitle foreign language movies?

Photo: froussecarton/Creative Commons

Read this post from Nina Porzucki. Or listen to the podcast above.

In the beginning there was light, a little music and subtitles, technically called intertitles. I’m talking the beginning of the 20th century, during the silent era of moviemaking, when an image really spoke a thousand words and intertitles were used sparingly to explain action, and dialogue, and exposition.

And then the talkies came. But while Al Jolson’s voice in ‘The Jazz Singer‘ did away with the need for the intertitle to do all that explaining, The Jazz Singer became the first film to need translating. In fact, it was the first film to officially use foreign language subtitles when it opened in Paris in 1929.

In the 80-plus-years since, subtitling has gone from a necessity to an art.

“People aren’t supposed to notice subtitles, if we’re doing our job properly. The ideal situation is when they aren’t even aware they’re reading subtitles,” says John Miller. Miller makes a living as a subtitler in Paris, where he went to school to learn the art of subtitling. And he’s been at it for 20 years translating French films into English.

“The French call ‘subtitlers’ ‘adapters.’ You do have to adapt it, you can’t just take a literal translation of the screenplay and throw it up on the screen. You would spend the whole time reading it and you wouldn’t be able to watch the film,” Miller says.

People can read an average of 12 characters a second, Miller says. A subtitler has about two seconds to relay everything being said to the audience and within those 24 characters, the subtitler not only has to translate what’s said, but all the complexities of everyday speech: puns, jokes, word play.

Sometimes you get lucky and expressions will easily translate from one language to another. But sometimes, says Miller, an expression gets lost in translation or, worse yet, doesn’t translate into American English at all. This happens all the time. In a recent film that Miller had to work on he had to translate the French expression “tu la boucle”

“Tu la boucle, which means shut-up, also means put your seatbelt on. So I [translated] the British English [expression], what I thought was American English too. ‘Belt up!’ which fits perfectly for both meanings, but it apparently [doesn’t mean the same thing] in American English. So I had to lose the double reference and just end up with “Buckle up!”

While subititling may be an art and a profession, increasingly this art is undergoing another evolution. Just like when sound came and turned moviemaking upsidedown, the digitization of film and TV has upended the subtitling industry. Digital media has allowed people around the world to access more content, more quickly. And more content means more subtitles, right?

Enter VIKI, just one of several online crowd-sourced subtitling platforms. The name VIKI is a mash-up of “video” and “wiki,” as in Wikipedia. And the service acts much like Wikipedia: Subtitlers submit translations for peer review, the crowd evaluates the translations, voting things up and down.

VIKI CEO Razmig Hovaghimian began to appreciate subtitles as a kid. He grew up in Egypt but spent his summers in Lebanon — watching Bollywood movies with his dad.

“Neither one of us speaks Hindi, but we just loved it. I remember the Amitab Bachchan movies,” he recalls.

VIKI licenses TV shows and movies from around the world — from Korean dramas, to Latin American soaps to Japanese Anime — and then puts them online so fans from around the world can subtitle them.

“[Some] 200 languages with over 700 million words translated by fans — for free,” Hovaghimian says.

Just who are these fan subbers doing the work for free? They’re teachers, doctors, lawyers, grandmothers, people like you and me, says Hovaghimian. Including retiree Patricia Pon from San Francisco.

Pon is a Cantonese speaker and the translator of more than 200,000 subtitles. What motivates Pon to do this in their spare time for no money? Simple, she says. She got fed up with bad translations. Bad, as in what she considers racy language. Like, for example, she says she was offended by a subtitle from a recent episode of the Korean Drama, Empress Ki. In the soap, the emperor’s concubine gets pregnant and the subtitle was written in a rather colloquial fashion.

“The tramp got knocked up”

“I don’t think so,” Pon says. She would’ve translated the line as “The consort was pregnant.”

Consort, tramp, concubine — subtitling risks a certain subjectivity. Would a retiree translate a Hong Kong gangster flick the same as a teenager? Does it matter? No, according to Razmig, that’s the beauty of the crowd. Subtitles are vetted and edited by many. And then the content can quickly be consumed by many more. And these rapid translations have led to the globalization of film and TV at hyper-speed in rather unexpected places.

“We had Egyptian movies that were doing great in Dutch. We have Korean movies that are doing phenomenal in Saudi Arabia. It’s actually our number one country for it. And it’s in Arabic subtitles,” Hovaghimian says.

VIKI is just one service in an ever-expanding world of crowd-sourced subtitles. While professional subtitler John Miller isn’t worried about being “crowded out” of his profession, he and fellow English-language subtitlers in Paris have felt the squeeze.

“It is a professional job. You wouldn’t necessarily want to have crowd-sourced surgeons or crowd-sourced mechanics. So, while what we do isn’t life or death, it is to the detriment of the films if they’re being done by people who, well, they’re certainly not professionals,” Miller says.

Certainly, Pon and her subbing pals aren’t claiming to be professionals. And the subtitles you’ll be reading at your local art house theatre aren’t the crowdsourced kind — at least not yet.

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The spread of mondegreens should have ended with the Internet — but it hasn’t

Was Jimi Hendrix kissing ‘the sky’ or ‘this guy’?

Read this post from Alina Simone. Or listen to the podcast above.

You may not know what “mondegreen” means, but you definitely have a great mondegreen story — like maybe mishearing the chorus for the Cuban song “Guantanamera” as “One ton tomato. I ate a one ton tomato.”

The word mondegreen was coined in an essay by writer Sylvia Wright in which she described misinterpreting a line from the Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Earl of Moray.” The actual line was, “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray, And laid him on the green.”

What did she hear? “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray, And Lady Mondegreen.”

It turns out there are scientific reasons for why it’s so easy to misinterpret songs and poems. The first thing you have to understand is that “when we understand what someone says, it’s always at least partly a hallucination,” says Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania,

Extracting meaning from sound actually depends on a combination of hearing and hoping.

“There’s a piece of what we understand that comes from the sound that comes in our ear,” Liberman explains, but “there’s a piece of what we understand that comes from the expectations in our brain.”

When that piece of sound contains weird metaphors or jarring imagery — or is just plain hard to hear — people tend to translate it into something that makes more sense to them. “And, of course, songs tend to have lyrics that are a little bit unexpected or unusual,” Liberman adds. “It’s what makes songs interesting.”

It’s also what makes mondegreens interesting — often more interesting, or at least way funnier, than the original lyrics themselves. For example: “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” instead of “Excuse me while I kiss the sky,” from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”

If you need a good mondegreen, you can check out Kiss This Guy, a website dedicated to them. You could also buy the book of mondegreens that hit the bestseller list in Germany.

In some countries, like Russia, mondegreens have even become a genre unto themselves. I talked to Anya Krushelnitskaya, who grew up in Soviet Russia, and I came to feel that a closed society provides the perfect laboratory for studying the spread and mutation of the mondegreen.

“We did have tiny, tiny holes in the Iron Curtain through which the lyrics would come in,” Krushelnitskaya tells me. That process involved somebody well-connected — like the son of a diplomat — selling liner notes they were able to smuggle into the country on the black market.

These lyrics were then disseminated by people who copied them by hand, like an epic game of “Telephone” played in an unfamiliar language. And since western pop circulated on homemade cassette tapes that were dubbed and redubbed — or primitive vinyl records carved out of x-rays — degraded sound quality was another big impediment to figuring out the words. It’s easy to see how mondegreens became the norm, not the exception.

But what may have begun as an honest effort to figure out the lyrics to popular Western songs soon morphed into a vibrant subgenre of soundalikes. For instance, Anya explains, The Beatles’ song, “Yellow Submarine” became, “Y’ela Margarin” — “She was eating margarine.”

These intentional mondegreens were funny, but they also served as Trojan horses for political commentary. Take another Beatles song, “Yesterday,” which Anya says was sung as the Russian-English mashup:

“Esti Dai (give me some food)

All my roubles seem so far away.”

There are those who believe that Lady Mondegreen has finally been slain by insidious lyrics websites and their cold, efficient databases. The New York Times Magazine bemoaned this scourge, as has The Guardian.

But lyrics sites aren’t slaying mondegreens — they’re spreading them.

“We crowdsourced all our lyrics,” says Shawn Setaro, former editor-in-chief of one of the biggest lyrics sites on the web, Genius. “Anyone could add lyrics, anyone could edit lyrics. They would type and transcribe. And it got to the point where when new popular songs came out, they would be on the site six, seven, eight minutes after they’re released.”

Those first stabs eventually get refined on Genius, but not every lyrics site strives for accuracy. One thing other sites do is solicit lyrics anonymously via email, with no vetting whatsoever. Another thing they do, Setaro tells me, “is just crawl and steal from other lyrics sites. So it becomes this giant circle.”

How does Genius know other sites steal from them? They did an experiment and subtly messed with the lyrics to some of their new songs, just to see if other sites were grabbing them. Sure enough, within hours, several sites had posted Genius’ lyrics — mistakes and all.

So it’s often the initial, uncrowdsourced version — the one fans pound out quickly — that gets picked up and spread around.

Iggy Azalea performing in 2014 (Photo Ralph Arvesen via Wikimedia Commons)

Even when lyrics sites go straight to the source, there’s room for error. This summer, Genius got the lyrics for “No Mediocre,” a song by hip-hop artist T.I., that features Iggy Azalea. They came directly from Azalea’s label, but she later tweeted that they were full of mistakes.

Sometimes fans don’t even believe the artists themselves. Danny Brown, a rapper from Detroit, has lyrics that are particularly prone to misinterpretation because of his wildly stylized vocals. Brown came in to the Genius office in Brooklyn himself to correct all of his lyrics.

But a few days later, Setaro says with a laugh, “his fans had put them back to what the original mishearings were. It was actually as a result of that that we built in a function to lock the pages, so once the artists say, ‘Hey, this is the right way,’ no one can change it.”

Some artists may scoff, some may shrug, and others might simply decide to embrace Lady Mondegreen. Many people claim that Jimi Hendrix even started singing “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy” for real once he found out people thought those were the words. You can judge for yourself in the version below, recorded at the 1967 Monterey Pop festival.

And according to linguists, that’s actually closer to what we’re expecting him to say, anyway. So go on, Jimi — kiss him.

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Remembrance of the Man who Translated Proust

Photo: louveciennes/Flickr Creative Commons

Read this post from Nina Porzucki. Or listen to the podcast above.

It’s not often that a translator has a story as good as the author himself. But C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s was wild enough to seem like fiction.

Moncrieff was the first person to translate Marcel Proust’s seven-volume epic, “Remembrance of Things Past” into English. He was also a poet, a soldier during World War I and a spy in Mussolini’s Italy.

But Moncrieff’s own life was mostly hidden, according to his great great-niece Jean Findlay. She recently published the book “Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator.”

“All I really knew about him is that he had translated Proust,” Findlay says. “His life story was really kept hidden from me. Nobody had investigated it very much — mainly because they were ashamed of the fact that he was a homosexual.”
Findlay’s own interest in her great great-uncle began after her mother handed Findlay a suitcase full of his poetry.

“He had a book of poems that he’d kept since adolescence, which were mainly written in pencil,” she says. “A lot of them were first dedicated to a girl, and then dedicated to a boy. A lot of them were erotic and a lot of them were poems which had multi-layers and hidden meanings, and I realized that this was a very complex and exciting person.”

Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff was born at the start of the 20th century. “He was a bit of genius: He learned French when three from a Belgian nanny, and then he was a brilliant translator of Latin and Greek at the age of 11,” Findlay says.

He was a voracious reader, going through the entire library at his boarding school. He also began writing and publishing his poems at age 16.

He started working as a translator after returning home from World War I, and even his first translations weren’t anything to scoff at. He translated “La Chanson de Roland,” or “The Song of Roland,” from medieval French, and then went on to translate Beowulf from Old English.

In 1922, he tackled “Swann’s Way” — the first volume of Proust’s epic, “Remembrance of Things Past.”

The translation proved to be a challenge, not the least because of the dense and complicated prose — one page could often be one whole sentence. But, according to Findlay, the manuscript itself was a mess as well.

“The version he was given was a very complicated version, because it had been published during the first World War, when there weren’t very many typesetters,” Findlay explains. “They mixed up a lot of the objects and subjects of the sentences. So very often it was a work on interpretation and guess work.”

Even Moncrieff’s translation of the title, “Remembrance of Things Past,” was also called into question. It’s a line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

“He thought that that line from Shakespeare contained enough references to cover the ambiguities in the French [“À la recherche du temps perdu”], which is about in search of lost time and wasted time,” Findlay says.

Proust himselt didn’t like Moncrieff’s title: He wanted the translator to put a “To” at the beginning: “To Remembrance of Lost Time.”

“And then [Proust] said, ‘Well my English isn’t that good, so that might not be a good idea,’” Findlay says.

Moncrieff’s translation of Proust went on to be the authoritative version for many years. A new translation wasn’t even published until 2002. That attempt took seven translators and seven years to write. Moncrieff also took seven years to complete the work — in between spying for the British in Mussolini’s Italy as well as translating other authors, like Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello.

Moncrieff’s version went on to influence authors like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. “In fact, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that she was reading Scott Moncrieff’s Proust, and it was so exciting it was almost like a sexual experience,” Findlay says.

She re-read her great great-uncle’s translation while she was working on his biography. “I think he’s better and better the more you read him,” she says.

“You can actually open Proust anywhere in the enormous novel and find something which is utterly poetic and meaning and will take you back into yourself,” Findlay says. “It’s a bit like meditation: It takes time apart. It can make one second an entire chapter.”

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