Rant

Speaking of translation, I'm (happily) getting to the point in the language where I can see when things are translated totally weird. Like this morning, What I Like About You was on TV. And this guy made a song for Amanda Bynes on his guitar. He was saying "You lie, you lie, you lie." And the subtitles read "Tu mens comme tu respires." Which actually means "You lie like you breathe." And, you know, that's totally different.

Now, I understand why the translation can be off on the dubs. The translators don't translate literally; instead they change certain things to meet common French speech and sometimes they change words to fit the movements of the mouth. For example, in Buffy, the first was translated to la force because, given how many times the name came up, it would be pretty obvious to any viewer that Buffy wasn't actually saying la premiere. (Sorry about the missing accent there, French readers.)

So wacky dubbed-translation is totally understandable. But I don't get the wacky subtitle translation. I mean, it's not like the audience is supposed to believe the guy is singing in French. And astute listeners would be able to tell he's saying the same two words over and over. So why change it?

And then, when I was reading this bilingual edition of American and English short stories, I noticed another funky translation. In the story "A Lamp in a Window" by Capote, there's this great scene where the narrator and the hospitable old woman have this super long conversation. And there's this great rambling sentence that Capote doesn't bother to give a speech tag (you know, a "he said" or "she said").

We talked about the hard Connecticut winters, politicians, far places ("I've never been abroad, but if ever I'd had the chance, the place I would have gone is Africa. Sometimes I've dreamed of it, the green hills, the heat, the beautiful giraffes, the elephants walking about"), religion ("Of course, I was raised a Catholic, but now, I'm almost sorry to say, I have an open mind. Too much reading, perhaps"), gardening ("I grow and can all my own vegetables; a necessity").

And I think the reason he doesn't bog down the passage with speech tags is that, without them, it's totally ambiguous who is talking. It could be either the old woman or the narrator. And we don't find out until a paragraph later when he tells us.

But in the French version, the translator sticks a pesky little, "dit-elle" (she says) right in the middle of the conversation! And I just don't see why. There is no "she says" in the original text at all. Hey translator, I got something to tell you. You fail. You suck. You can't just go around adding words cause you think they clarify something. Maybe the point was to not clarify. Asshat.