This Would Be A Lot More Fun If I Didn't Know How It Sounded: A Rant about Subtitles
Yesterday I decided to watch a film I loved as a child: Labyrinth. I hadn't seen it since I started losing my hearing over two and a half years ago, but for me it's one of those films I can say the lines along with the characters, because I remember it that well.
All the same, I decided to turn the subtitles on to make things easier for myself. I wish I hadn't.
The first really weird thing that I noticed was that any word that was spoken as a contraction was un-contracted, for want of a better word - for example, "I can't" was constantly written as "I cannot" which, if you're able to hear the rhythm of the speech, can throw you off a little. However, "don't you" being replaced by "do you not" threw me off a lot, because it didn't fit the pattern of speech at all.
I can think of three reasons why this may have happened:
Of course, that sort of thing could just be down to lack of space - there's only enough room for a certain amount of characters, after all. But there's also the occasional phrase which is changed for no apparent reason. In the same scene, Sarah, talking about her brother, says "Please, where is he?" and Jareth replies "You know very well where he is". According to the subtitles the reply is "You know that very well" - even though there is plenty of space for the original line, and the line is spoken at a speed where you would actually have time to read it before the next line (which is another reason why they sometimes change these things).
Put the two together - the expanding of contractions and the missing words - and you get something that might just give you a headache. For example, one of the lines I quote with some regularity is "I can't. Don't you understand that I can't?" - or, as the subtitle track decides to put it "I cannot. Do you not understand?", which as it turned out was the last straw for me when it came to watching the film. It might not sound like much, but that was when I realised that watching the film wouldn't do me any good (the whole point of watching it was to help with my depression, because yesterday was a Bad Day) - after all, if I couldn't enjoy it because of the subtitles during the first ten minutes, enjoying the entire film wasn't going to happen.
This is why accurate subtitles are important to me - not only can inaccurate subtitles change the meaning of a film, but it can make you want to throw a childhood favourite out of a window.
Bonus rant: Before I could just switch off the DVD, I had to check one more thing. During the opening credits, the song "Underground" plays, and it plays again a couple of minutes later, but I had noticed that there were no subtitles for it, or even something saying what the song was called - and that gave me this horrible feeling. So I skipped ahead to the song "Magic Dance", which Jareth (with the help of several goblins) sings to the baby Toby.
Guess what? No subtitles.
I am not the only person who thinks that songs sung by characters in films should be subtitled - I had a horrible moment yesterday where I thought I was, which is why I posted this poll yesterday, just to make sure - because most of them time those songs are part of the plot or character development, and therefore important. It has been pointed out to me that lack of subtitles for the songs might be a rights issue, especially in this case (David Bowie wrote/co-wrote most of the songs for Labyrinth), but surely if you have permission to show those songs being sung, getting permission to subtitle them shouldn't be that hard.
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All the same, I decided to turn the subtitles on to make things easier for myself. I wish I hadn't.
The first really weird thing that I noticed was that any word that was spoken as a contraction was un-contracted, for want of a better word - for example, "I can't" was constantly written as "I cannot" which, if you're able to hear the rhythm of the speech, can throw you off a little. However, "don't you" being replaced by "do you not" threw me off a lot, because it didn't fit the pattern of speech at all.
I can think of three reasons why this may have happened:
- The person who did the subtitles hated all contractions, and this was their attempt at rebelling against a language that's full of them
- The person who did the subtitles had a bet with someone else that they could only win by subtitling a film without using any apostrophes, and the subtitler really needed the money
- The apostrophe key on the subtitle-typing-machine was broken
Of course, that sort of thing could just be down to lack of space - there's only enough room for a certain amount of characters, after all. But there's also the occasional phrase which is changed for no apparent reason. In the same scene, Sarah, talking about her brother, says "Please, where is he?" and Jareth replies "You know very well where he is". According to the subtitles the reply is "You know that very well" - even though there is plenty of space for the original line, and the line is spoken at a speed where you would actually have time to read it before the next line (which is another reason why they sometimes change these things).
Put the two together - the expanding of contractions and the missing words - and you get something that might just give you a headache. For example, one of the lines I quote with some regularity is "I can't. Don't you understand that I can't?" - or, as the subtitle track decides to put it "I cannot. Do you not understand?", which as it turned out was the last straw for me when it came to watching the film. It might not sound like much, but that was when I realised that watching the film wouldn't do me any good (the whole point of watching it was to help with my depression, because yesterday was a Bad Day) - after all, if I couldn't enjoy it because of the subtitles during the first ten minutes, enjoying the entire film wasn't going to happen.
This is why accurate subtitles are important to me - not only can inaccurate subtitles change the meaning of a film, but it can make you want to throw a childhood favourite out of a window.
Bonus rant: Before I could just switch off the DVD, I had to check one more thing. During the opening credits, the song "Underground" plays, and it plays again a couple of minutes later, but I had noticed that there were no subtitles for it, or even something saying what the song was called - and that gave me this horrible feeling. So I skipped ahead to the song "Magic Dance", which Jareth (with the help of several goblins) sings to the baby Toby.
Guess what? No subtitles.
I am not the only person who thinks that songs sung by characters in films should be subtitled - I had a horrible moment yesterday where I thought I was, which is why I posted this poll yesterday, just to make sure - because most of them time those songs are part of the plot or character development, and therefore important. It has been pointed out to me that lack of subtitles for the songs might be a rights issue, especially in this case (David Bowie wrote/co-wrote most of the songs for Labyrinth), but surely if you have permission to show those songs being sung, getting permission to subtitle them shouldn't be that hard.
comments | reply