This video has been dubbed and subtitled
into several languages. On most devices, you can
call up YouTube’s settings, and switch between them.
And if you do, you’ll find that outside the
original language, English, the words in the subtitles and
dubbing often don’t match. Which happens a lot,
mostly in professional TV shows, and it can be frustrating
for those of us who like to listen
but also use subtitles. The short reason why is: subtitles and dubbing are usually done
by different teams of people. But to answer why that happens, I need to take you on a journey
that’s going to involve geese, a roller coaster,
and this advert. This video is sponsored by NordVPN. That’s not a joke, this video is
actually sponsored by NordVPN, who have been very useful as
I’ve been travelling around! Visit nordvpn.com/tomscott to find the
best deal they’re offering right now. Now, in most of the languages
that advert was translated into, the subtitles and dubbing
pretty much match. In French, Spanish and Portuguese, the word order is roughly
the same as in English, and it’s a simple translation. But in the most obvious
Hindi translation, the company name sits in the
middle of the sentence, and standard practice for
modern professional dubbing is to match lip movements
as closely as possible. Now, there is a way to rephrase
the sentence in Hindi so that the company name
sits at the end. The dubbing team chose that option, and the lip movements
pretty much match. But the subtitling team didn’t
see any reason to do that, and so the lines are different. In Japanese, which has
the same problem, the dubbing team instead
found a translation where the lip movements
look close enough. But why don’t they just
take the dubbing script, and then turn it
into subtitles? Why translate everything twice? Well, subtitles have their
own limitations. I gave the translation teams
for this video some deliberately
difficult examples. A few years ago, I made a video
on YouTube’s copyright systems, and it included this sidebar
about a song that I don’t like: Maroon 5’s Memories is an
infuriating composition that uses the start of the melody
of Canon in D but never resolves it, which means it has the same
stuck-in-your-head effect as the jingle from Alfred Bester’s
The Demolished Man, and I hate it. The modern approach to subtitling
in most languages is that reading is
faster than talking, and that even for
fast talking like that, you put every word on screen.
The viewer can always pause. But that wasn’t always the case. If you watch anything in English that was
subtitled more than 10 or 15 years ago, like reruns on television
or movies on DVD, you’ll find the subtitles
often summarise what’s said. Style guides used to emphasise the skill in
“careful and sensitive subtitle editing”, because they thought it was important
that everyone got the meaning, even if they were a slow reader, because you couldn’t easily
pause and go back. And besides, why would someone who can hear
watch video with subtitles? It’s not like we’d all end up with
tiny televisions in our pocket, or sound mixing changes would mean dialogue was going to be
suddenly difficult to hear. In the original English version of
that Maroon 5 rant that I just did, I made a reference to
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, which isn’t that well-known
even in English. So for Japanese viewers, who have
probably never heard of it, the local subtitle translator decided
to remove the reference entirely and get the same meaning
across in fewer characters. Opinions can differ, but I think
that’s a pretty solid decision. If they’d just taken the breathless,
high speed performance of the Japanese voice actor, then it would have been a
worse experience for subtitle readers. And well done to the voice actor,
by the way! That cannot have been easy. And this is just to translate
one person performing a script! Imagine if it was a reality show, with six people shouting and
talking quickly and stumbling their words
and interrupting each other. The subtitles would
have to summarise, while the voice actors for the dub
can shout over each other. But it does mean that in this case, for some Japanese viewers,
that reference is lost. That’s one of the other
big challenges with translation. How much do you translate the words
versus translating the meaning? Here’s another really difficult example. “Anyone want to buy some goslings?” “They’re going cheep.” The English version of that joke
is pretty much impossible to translate! It relies not just on a pun, but
on knowledge of colloquial English. You have to know that “going”
can mean “making a noise”. You have to know that “cheep”
is the English word for the noise that baby birds make,
cheep-cheep-cheep, and you have to know that
“going cheap”, spelled differently, is slang for “on sale
at a good price”. I loved seeing the responses from
the translators on this example. A couple of folks translated it
word for word, and just gave up on the joke.
Fair enough. But I do want to highlight
a couple of them. The Portuguese subtitle and dubbing teams
came up with the same joke! And so did the Spanish subtitler. ‘Ganso’ in both languages means ‘goose’,
and ‘cansado’ means ‘tired’, so they combined them
into the word ‘gansado’, and now I’m asking if anyone
wants the goslings because I’m goose-slash-tired of them?
Brilliant. And both the French and Spanish
dubbing teams came up with their own puns based on their languages’
words for bird noises, because yes, the sounds that animals
are said to make differ in each language! And I love this! This is translating meaning and intent,
not just words. In case you’re wondering, I did try several AI translation tools,
as well as just asking a large language model
to translate this stuff, and as of right now,
as of 2023, capturing that nuance,
that meaning, that performance, definitely still requires humans. At least for the goose clip, the translators didn’t have
to match my lips. But they did have to
match the goose’s honk! Because I talked over it, so they had to go to another bit
of the video that you didn’t see, copy and paste the background noise
and a different goose honk from there, and synchronize them up. Someone had to lip-sync a goose. Beak-sync, actually. I— they—
they don’t have lips. …I don’t think they have lips. All of which comes together
for this example. Last year, I made a video where I tried to get over my
phobia of roller coasters. And, spoiler, I did! And just after my terror changed to joy,
on a ride called Nemesis, I shouted this: Yes! Have it! The original English
is “have it”. How on earth do you
translate “have it”? It’s got no literal meaning. And more than that,
it’s kind of obscure slang? Different people in
different parts of Britain might use it for different things, and it’s almost impossible
to Google. In my context, it’s a cry of excitement, triumph, adrenaline,
encouragement, success. It’s the sort of thing that you might
yell after your team scores a goal, or to cheer on your friend
after they’ve successfully downed two pints of
lager back-to-back. It feels very male?
Very “drunken lads’ night out’? I did pass a note with all that
context on to the translators, but for many productions
they won’t be working with notes. They’ll only have the original show,
and maybe the script, if there is one. So, here is that cry in all
the video’s languages. Subtitling teams have their
choice of any word or phrase, but they have to fit
the words on the screen. Dubbing teams can get
their voice actors to emote in the studio
as much as possible… but the lip movements
have to match. That’s why subtitles
and dubbing differ. And if you want a perfect
example of that: …this advert has also been
translated into five languages! And no matter which
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