Idiomatic Translation For Dummies

Via the awesome Malene Arpe, this is the trailer for the film Coco Avant Chanel, subtitled by a student with one and half semesters of introductory French.



With the exception of a few conjugations and a few misheard homophones, the translation is accurate. Painstakingly so. I'm actually impressed that someone with 1.5 sememsters of high school French could do that.

But that's just the problem. It's painstakingly accurate, so painstakingly accurate that the translator hasn't given a moment's thought to whether it sounds idomatic in English. This very dramatically shows why literal or close translation won't do, and we need idiomatic translation. The translator needs to think about whether things sound normal in English, because something that doesn't sound normal in English (no matter how close it is to the source language) is practically useless to the Anglophone reader, as these subtitles so dramatically show.

I'm not going to tear the whole thing apart because you can do that yourself. I'll just do the first line as an example.

French: "Comment vous vous appelez?"
Subtitle: "How do you call yourself?"

That is a perfect literal translation. Every single word in that sentence is translated into the single English word that most closely expresses its meaning.

The only problem is that in English we would never say "How do you call yourself?" In that place, to communicate that concept, to obtain that answer from our interlocutor, we very nearly always say "What's your name?"

Lather, rinse, repeat for every single line.