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Comment by narag | Hacker News Reader

Such words are the nightmares of people who translate fiction.

Translators that work dubbing movies have harder constraints and seldom fail to make sense, only when there're wordplays or words that sound similar to others...

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They seldom fail to make sense, but they sound unnatural 99% of the time.

That is very generous. Looking at Swedish subtitles of Hollywood movies I often cringe at idioms translated word by word rather than to common Swedish equivalents. These make no sense if you don't happen to know the English already.

When watching dubbed things (which in Swedish means exclusively children's shows) I often hear things which make little sense until I suddenly realise there's an English sentence with similar structure that would make sense in this context.

edit: In other words, translations often fail to make sense when poorly done, and a lot of them are.

In Spanish, most of the excesive literal translations happened 50 or 100 years ago, so they're part of the language now. Noboby blinks when somebody says "my name is" translated word by word. It used to be extremely unnatural.

Sometimes I enable English subtitles keeping the dubbed Spanish audio and it's often well done. There is very talented people working on the translations, giving the right tone to conversations.

They also have much more context to work with.

Compare "Fuck" said with mad, resigned and amazed voice. It's 3 different words in some languages.

Or compare a line "Our hero heard someone crying 'I loved her' from the crowd". In some languages depending what grammatical gender is the person shouting the word ending in 'love' is different.

English books often skip that information, so the translator has to deduce or ask the author who was shouting that line. In a movie you know because you can see that person or hear the voice.

I remember reading one example of this in an interview with the Swedish translator of the Harry Potter books. At some point a grandmother (I believe Neville's) is mentioned. In Swedish, it is impossible (at least while sounding remotely natural) to say "grandmother" without specifying whether it's the maternal or paternal grandmother. The translator had to just guess, and ended up being wrong when more context was given in a later book.

I believe it's also the case that there is no word for "uncle" in Swedish.

This makes more sense to me because your relationship to your mother's brother is actually meaningfully different to your mother's sister's husband.

On the other side translating a book would have much more text than a film. That would increase the chances of running into difficult translations.

I remember watching, in a youth hostel back in the 80s, an Aussie movie dubbed into German.

My German was minimal, but when a swagman got out of a semi that had just given him a lift, he said "Danke Comarade" and I realized that he said "Thanks mate" which has greater connotations and meaning than just a thank you.

They also aren't translations, a lot of the time, in the sense that they express the same meaning as the original text. Often they're simply replacements that are compatible with the action on the screen.

Most of the time the meaning of the original text is to be a filling compatible with the action on the screen.

Making sense != conveying all the possible meanings (or the main meanings)

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