I've spent a considerable amount subtitling a TV series, and there were subtitles floating around for it before I started, but they contained a ton of bad English; wrong idioms, and wrong word order.

But when I did my translation, I tried to stick to the word order and expressions of the original language when possible. You could translate each sentence to the most likely way an English-speaking person would express themselves, but can also stray a bit, pick something that's closer to the original, but still works. I wanted to subtly remind people that they're not in Kansas anymore. Even though the show is a teen high school drama, it's absolutely not an American high school, so you can't use words associated with that either.

One example from the French remake: In English, a conventional piece of dialogue goes "I love you" - "I love you too".

But in French, that dialogue goes "Je t'aime" - "Moi aussi". So in this case we actually picked "Me too" as the translation for that, which definitely sticks out, but comes across as a little bit of a teaching French moment, because you can clearly hear that the character isn't saying "Je t'aime aussi".

That's kinda what you were looking for, right?

However, somewhere there is a line, across which lies a sea of Bad English, and even further from that line, you get the incomprehensible gibberish of the work in the article, and you really, really don't want to end up there.

"But in French, that dialogue goes "Je t'aime" - "Moi aussi". So in this case we actually picked "Me too" as the translation for that, which definitely sticks out, but comes across as a little bit of a teaching French moment, because you can clearly hear that the character isn't saying "Je t'aime aussi"."

true! and to be honest, also the first one isn't probably meaning "je t'aime" at all

Literally “I thou like/love”

There's multiple translations of the closing dialog in Breathless. (Of course, even the English title isn't a literal translation of À bout de souffle—that would be Out of Breath.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathless_(1960_film)#Closi...

That's a pretty cool example of how some pieces of dialogue are just untranslateable.

There's a common misconception among a lot of people, and definitely among the HN crowd, that there exists a good translation for every sentence in every language to every other language. I remember some articles a year ago or so here about how Google Translate had supposedly created some kind of internal language through its ML algorithms and data.

Yeah, but no. Google Translate would completely fail on that dialogue from Out of Breath, and if you were relying on it, you wouldn't even know it had failed!

I'm in the skeptical camp when it comes to literal translations - I don't think it shows the "mind" of the source language. If anything, I think it has the opposite effect of losing the forest in search of trees, or making phrases unnecessarily more "exotic" than they originally are.

E.g., if I say in Korean that I've become "green onion kimchi", I'm not picturing green onion kimchi in my mind. (I don't even particularly like green onion kimchi.) I'm saying I'm dead tired. When I say "my nose is three feet", I'm not picturing my face being deformed like Pinocchio - I'm saying I'm in no situation to help another.

In cases like that it would be up to me as the fascinated viewer to dig in to those idioms. It would be helped with a translator’s notes of course, but I would expect it to take a little extra time and effort to watch a show like that.

At the end in your example, I feel like I would have a deeper understanding of kimchi as it relates to Korean speakers, how “green onion kimchi” is different, and why that means someone is dead tired.

Then, next time it comes up I would understand it a little better due to slightly different context.

To me, that all feels like a win

> At the end in your example, I feel like I would have a deeper understanding of kimchi as it relates to Korean speakers, how “green onion kimchi” is different, and why that means someone is dead tired.

Picture this situation in reverse. If you were instead a Korean person, digging in to why Americans associate cats and dogs with heavy rain? Or why English speakers eat butterflies before they do something on stage?

Learning idioms is useful and interesting, but I agree with the other commenter that you shouldn't look to an idiom to gain cultural insight.

Maybe I’m the odd one out, but as a native english speaker I also find english idioms to be interesting and to speak volumes about the person saying them.

“Raining cats and dogs” I had not looked up before, but I don’t hear it much currently so I would likely associate it with someone of a specific older age range, or someone younger who’s been around (or who is emulating) older people. Even that small inference brings some depth to understanding what someone is saying, and the character of the person saying it.

As for “butterflies in my stomach”, that’s even more important as it’s a tactile expression, describing the feeling of nerves as though there were literal butterflies fluttering lightly in one’s stomach. The fact that at some point an english speaker decided to express the internal feeling as though it was something tangible that other people around them were familiar with, that’s (imo) some pretty fascinating cultural context and something that I see repeated throughout english. I also suspect that it happens in many (but importantly not all) other languages/cultures, which is also pretty fascinating.

Many expressions and idioms like that are so goddamn old that they exist in most European languages: "Schmetterlinge im Bauch", "Papillons dans le ventre", "Fjärilar i magen", "Mariposas en el estómago", "Fluturi In Stomac", etc.

Couldn’t not share this here, even though I suspect no more than 5 people will ever see this comment: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJEPfv6Q/

YES. I'm stoked about David Bentley Hart's New Testament translation for that reason: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/030024844X/ref=ox_sc_sav...

> Reproducing the texts' often fragmentary formulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced a pitilessly literal translation, one that captures the texts' impenetrability and unfinished quality while awakening readers to an uncanniness that often lies hidden beneath doctrinal layers.

If you're stoked for that, then I would be remiss to not say something about Robert Alter's one man translation of the Hebrew Bible.

From wiki: "Alter's translation aims to convey the literary style of the original Hebrew text in English, recreating as much as possible its poetic rhythms and metaphors"

I think many of the Psalms and Ecclesiastes in particular are more beautifully rendered in his translation

Agreed - I've found Alter's work to be very helpful and his notes are excellent.

It’s up for conjecture how “pitilessly literal” the DBH translation is. As is the case with most translations, he imports his own agenda (particularly with regard to his universalist soteriology). It’s good, but it’s also not as “pitilessly” objective as he may believe it to be.

Traduttore, traditore, etc.

I'm dubious about any such claim to objectivity.

Sure, caveat emptor.

This might not have been common in the past but it isn't a new thing. I know my dad had a copy of the new testament that had the original Greek on one line and a word by word translation on the next. Not the most readable translation or layout but interesting if you wanted to get closer to the original writing.

An interesting case of this is the localization of the original Pokémon games. Before they were released officially in North America by Nintendo, a group of Chinese software pirates "translated" them into English first and sold them. The official translation came out later. Needless to say the unofficial translation is totally screwy in a hilarious way. What's even more interesting though is that it's a hyper-literal translation, so things that were localized out in Nintendo's translation (alcohol, death, gambling) are presented in full glory. Team Rocket is known as "The Regiment of the Guided Missile" and the Pokédex is known as "the illustrated handbook of PET," spelled out fully every time. Pokémon are referred to as PETs in general. There's an item called sulfuric acid.

I had a great time playing it and noting the differences/absurd translations with my friends.

Since words don't have a one-to-one mapping or anything--even in cases where the mapping of words themselves makes sense (and if often doesn't, as words in language say have different attachments for how to convey meaning)--this is still mostly a subjective translation problem; if you want to come close to this I recommend playing with apps like Pleco (for Chinese) that are designed to give you the source text in the original language and then let you click each word to get a dictionary definition (in your language) for each word (which of course isn't a single word and can't be, which is the problem with trying to get a "literal" translation). (I think Google Translate might have a mode like this?)

I think Interlinear Texts tries to do something similar, showing the original language and literal word-for-word meaning in English:

https://interlinearbooks.com/

If you're trying to learn a language, use the Assimil books.

They have the target language on the left side and usually both a literal and an easy-to-understand translation on the same height of the page on the right side.

Sometimes with explanations as to where the expression comes from.

Also: very little grammar (only to the extended needed, nothing upfront)

Best books I ever found for learning languages.

I have no affiliation, but learnt 2 languages to B2/C1 level with their help.

A lot of times literal translations eventually become a part of the destination language as well.

Examples include "long time no see" which is now common in English but has roots in either Chinese or Native American languages.

Likewise, the phrasing "chicken-egg problem" originated in Western culture but is now often used literally in modern Chinese, e.g. "雞和蛋的問題".

The proper word for such translations, by the way, is "calque".

Another famous calque is "groudhog", which comes from the Dutch aardvark. Yes, the two animals are completely unrelated: the Dutch referred to them both as aardvark though, and only one of them got calqued into English.

There isn't much of a mind of the language with such matters.

They are idioms and quite often native speakers do not actually realize what they are saying when they use them.

I remember that when I gained more proficiency at Finnish, that many Finns remarked that I was teaching them because I was manually analyzing what was actually literally being said and they never quite considered what they were saying.

Consider that many English speakers when they are saying “God damn it.” they are really not realizing that “God” is the subject, “damn” is the finite verb in the subjunctive mood, and “it” is the direct object, thus expressing a wish that God damn it, whatever “it” might be. — it is an indivisible idiom for them which is also why it is often spelt as one word.

Especially because the subjunctive mood is rarely used as such to express a wish in modern English.

I agree with your point about idioms many times being used without awareness of what they “actually” mean, and while I would still say it’s interesting for me to hear/see the idiom anyway, it’s not really the meat of where the “mind” is to me.

There are dozens of examples I can think of, such as how people refer to themselves and to others (Japanese is especially interesting here), how people communicate spatial relationships/directions, and how people refer to body parts (calf in Portuguese literally translates as “potato of the leg”).

It’s said that our language shapes how we think, and just the barest glimpse I’ve seen in to “literal” translations gives me a window in to not only how that’s true, but how particular languages can shape particular thought patterns.

> There are dozens of examples I can think of, such as how people refer to themselves and to others (Japanese is especially interesting here), how people communicate spatial relationships/directions, and how people refer to body parts (calf in Portuguese literally translates as “potato of the leg”).

The last one is surely an idiom, and the other parts are the ones that are often hard to translate literally.

I wouldn't say that “the honorable front” as a translation would really do justice to the meaning of /omae/ in Japanese and how it differs from, say, /anata/. “the honorable front” is the literal meaning of /omae/, but it's again an idiom that Japanese speakers scarcely realize the origins of, though Japanese's ideographic spelling perhaps would serve to make speakers more aware of such origins.

> The last one is surely an idiom

What about French’s “potato” translating as “Apple of the ground”?

In Canada that’s how bilingual packaging labels potatoes.

This also I suppose raises an interesting question: is the boundary between idiom and word really that clear?

I recently finished "Control", and there's a major character who speaks significantly in finish idioms that were directly translated: "I can tell you are not a yesterday's grouse's son"[1] I definitely got most of it from context; "take them behind the sauna" isn't that different from "Take them out back", and it was a fun way to make the character "weird" (which is important for story reasons)

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/controlgame/comments/d5f0ki/ahtis_i...

For fr/en, author Jean-Loup Chiflet has written a few books consisting entirely of what you're describing. The most famous is "Sky My Husband (dictionary of the running English)"

Interestingly, at least in the wikipedia examples, the literal translation is not even really literal. For instance, "As paredes têm ouvidos." literal translation is "The walls have ears". It's fascinating that they translated to "The walls have hearsay." I think that's an artefact from the initial Portuguese -> French translation.

That book is more like getting a phrase translate into a chain of languages and see what it comes out in the other side.

You are thinking about foreignization, which is more common (but still not really common) in the translation of literary fictions than that of subtitles. I think most movies don't do that because they target casual audience who is not ready to consume too much foreignization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_and_foreignizati...

Well, one more example for the TV show I spent time translating: It's a teen high school drama, but it's a Norwegian high school, not an American high school. The characters have all just started high school, but during your first year in Norway, you and your classmates will vary in age from 15-16-17, and high school lasts three years, not four.

If you use "freshmen" to describe them, you get the "new at school" aspect, but viewers will get the completely wrong idea about their age. If you use "juniors", you get the age aspect right, but their role and social standing at school would be completely off.

So in a case like that, domesticating the translation simply doesn't work, you'd get super confused as a viewer if you use American high school terms. So you have to foreignize it, you have to call them something else, and you have to make up new terms when translating the various Norwegian derogatory terms for first-year students that exist.

For what it's worth, "freshman" is American, and the related British/Australian/NZ term "fresher" only applies to first year students in their first weeks at university - not at schools.

I'm glad you didn't use the word. It would seem really out of place.

In England, we just said "6th year" (cf Harry Potter), "lower sixth" or "Year 12", depending on how old fashioned the school was.

And "first-grader" is something completely different, those are six years old, not sixteen, so that was completely out. Plenty of traps and completely inappropriate translations as well.

I ended up using "first-year", "second-year" and "third-year", and "firstie" for when older students were looking down on them.

I think this is a good example of a time when even the “general audience” is best served by using a “foreignization”, or even by just using the original word with some notes as to what that means.

You see this in anime and manga translations- the source of the “translator’s note: kekatu means plan” - as they try to get across the information not carried in the words themselves.