Cinemagoers in China have complained about poor dialogue renderings in the new Marvel movie, following last year’s translation of Guardians of the Galaxy title as Interplanetary Unusual Attacking Team
Chinese filmgoers have apparently been left close to tears by clumsily translated subtitles on new Marvel superhero epic The Avengers: Age of Ultron.
According to reports, the initial subtitle track for the film was so poorly rendered that fans of Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk and Black Widow were left distressed and disappointed. A line in which Chris Evans’s Captain America says: “You get hurt, hurt ’em back. You get killed … walk it off,” was translated as: “Run fast if someone tries to kill you.” Meanwhile, Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man tells his comrades: “We may not make it out of this,” but the line is concisely translated as: “Let’s back off now.”
Writing on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, filmgoer Wo Jiao Sanzhiya wrote: “The woman in front me almost cried and said let’s go home, I can’t put up with it.” His post was retweeted thousands of times. More.
See: The Guardian
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China
Local time: 20:19
Chinese to English
I've seen some really fantastic subtitles on big Hollywood films. The Pixar movies, for example, always seem to be very well rendered in Chinese, both in subtitles and in dubbing. I've always wondered how they did it, because it's much better work than I usually see on the commercial market! I guess with this one they tried to go a cheaper way and it's backfired.
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:19
Chinese to English
Talking about bad Chinese subtitles - the subbing of A Song of Ice and Fire has been really poor. I was watching the DVD with my brother-in-law (native speaker of Chinese), and there were loads of parts where I was laughing and he wasn't. I took a peak at the subtitles, and realised that a lot of swearing and dark humour had been taken out. It really spoiled the dialogues between Tyrion and Bronn. I know that this can happen when localising any product, but it just seemed a bit like overkill. ▲ Collapse
China
Local time: 20:19
Chinese to English
I imagine the Game of Thrones subs were fansubs, weren't they? The mainland distributors would have a hard time with it, with all the sex, so no-one can have paid to have them subbed yet. Fan subs are always going to be dodgy, but sometimes the subbing on the big films is really quite inspired. I saw that Monkey King movie - don't remember the English subs at all. I remember they were there, but I must have tuned them out after a while.
Japan
Local time: 21:19
Japanese to English
They should have gone with a Proz.com translator!
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:19
Chinese to English
I imagine the Game of Thrones subs were fansubs, weren't they? The mainland distributors would have a hard time with it, with all the sex, so no-one can have paid to have them subbed yet. Fan subs are always going to be dodgy, but sometimes the subbing on the big films is really quite inspired. I saw that Monkey King movie - don't remember the English subs at all. I remember they were there, but I must have tuned them out after a while.
I should have tuned them out, but I used to be interested in subtitling so I wanted to see how good or bad they were. The Game of Thrones subs in Taiwan weren't fan subs - I think it was HBO Asia that did the DVD set. The problem wasn't the overall quality - like you might see with fan-subs - it was more to do with intentionally watering down or even omitting some of the swear words, which also spoiled a lot of the jokes.
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