“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
– The Godfather
If English is your first language, or you are among those who can read, write and understand the language, it won’t be difficult for you to read and understand the above mentioned quote from one of the legendary movies. However, if you are someone from Spain, or China, the possibility of understanding English language or any language other than your native language can be difficult. This difficulty started the trend of subtitles in movies. Today, the world has become a smaller place and movies contributed to this change in a lot of ways. Subtitles have made it easier for people to understand movies from different countries.
However, it is seen that a lot of people who understand a particular language criticize the subtitles while watching a movie, or find mistakes in the translation. Sometimes this happens due to the difficulty and limitations faced by the translators during the process of translation; however, it may also happen due to the lack of experience of a translator. Let’s talk about the difficulties faced by the translators at first.
The amount of characters allowed while translating a dialogue is among the most imperative factors that drastically influence the translator in the completion of their task. Let’s take an example of English and Spanish here. When a translator is required to translate an English video into Spanish, they might face many issues because Spanish requires more words to express a certain dialogue, or line. When a translator has to reduce the words to fit them in one line, the literal meaning may change.
Another difficulty could be time. While watching a movie, audience requires less time to listen than to read, which means that translation must be concise so that the audience has enough time to read subtitles. Further to the aforesaid, it is also important to keep the cultural differences in mind, while creating subtitles for a movie.
Now, let’s focus on the second issue. The accuracy and grammatical errors. While selecting a translation service provider, it is important to ensure that they have enough experience in the field and have created subtitles for many movies and TV series. Apart from that, you must also ask if their translators are native speakers. This will help you get accurate translation and reduce grammatical errors and cultural differences.
Want to add subtitles to your movies, video, or TV series? Contact us today!