If a Chinese movie wants to achieve good results in English-speaking countries and be understood and .....
If a Chinese movie wants to achieve good results in English-speaking countries and be understood and respected by English-speaking audiences, the importance of translation quality can be imagined, but the current situation of the industry is that translation has become the most under-appreciated part of the whole movie industry. So what exactly is an excellent film subtitle translation?
Putting aside the terrible translations of the rumored horrible pirated discs and the translators who specialize in this for fun (which in fact has formed a small circle of people who watch how the subtitling team can tell the plot in another way and still fit seamlessly with the original plot).
In fact, there is another situation that is very, very, very annoying, that is, the subtitle producers have too strong a sense of existence, directly in the subtitles to express their personal feelings, spit, seriously damage the sense of view, the good end of a subtitle, make and pop-up screen like.
And this kind of subtitle is a non-professional, usually, directly point out the key points of the plot. A good movie is playing, and then the above ghostly floating past a line of small words: attention, high energy ahead, or remember this plot, later will be a direct review of the plot. This is an example: the subtitles of Mind Your Language produced by the late summer autumn subtitle group, there is a direct spit in it, and actually a line of large yellow letters, so that people do not pay attention to it can not.
In fact, movie subtitle translation can be expanded to the whole translation work without the word movie subtitle.
Many domestic producers are influenced by "Xin Da Ya" and believe that Chinese to English translation must also be a letter of elegance, even if the original script is not much literary, but also hope that the translation reads "high" and "beautiful writing", or the translation of half-white Chinese into the so-called "classical English" (there is no definition of "classical English" in the English world).
However, as we Chinese are not native English speakers, many people think that "elegant" translations are likely to be incorrect in grammar and expression, and even wrong in tense (English scripts and synopses are usually narrated in the general present tense). Even Yan Fu never explained the standard of "faithfulness and elegance".
WetransTech believes that instead of finding a Chinese person who thinks he or she is good at English to set the tone, it would be better to find a native English speaker to read the translation to see if the grammar is wrong and if the content is understandable - the translation is ultimately meant for foreigners to read, not for domestic audiences with varying levels of English.
Put down the "letter of elegance" obsession, may as well take your selected translation to the foreign screenwriter to see if he can read it.

