Translation: A Labour of Love

 

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Tani Fakile

 

As more and more TV shows and movies find their way on to a global stage, the importance of translation is becoming increasingly more apparent. Despite appearing simple, the process of translation is truly intricate and complex, not as easy as entering something into Google Translate and receiving a perfectly accurate script in return. While media executives do have so much to focus on, we are encouraging you to not take the task of translation lightly.

From a linguistic perspective, translation from one language to another is not always a 1:1 relationship. Even on a single word level, we often see cases of words that can’t be found in other languages. For example, in the case of concrete nouns, it may be a word for plant that isn’t found in other countries and as such no specific word exists in the languages in other countries. This becomes more complex when we begin to talk about abstract nouns. Take for instance, the Portuguese word ‘saudade’. In Portuguese, saudade describes a deep sense of melancholy and longing for something you once had but may never have again (Lexico, 2021). No one word in the English language currently can succinctly convey this feeling. This phenomena is only intensified when you move from a word level to a entire script for  a movie or TV show where the language is carefully chosen to communicate information about a character’s personality and experience, and to connect to the audience and bring them into the story that is being told. Often fictional media aims to recreate and embellish complex interactions, and though we may not be aware of it, cultural context can be an integral part of our day to day conservations. Even down to a greeting or throwaway comment, cultural awareness is an integral part of successful translation.

A key factor to consider is that when a show or movie is being translated from one language to another, it is not just a linguistic difference that needs to be navigated but also cultural differences. For example, in my own experience of watching Indian Hindi language programs, I noticed that characters would often end phone calls by saying the phrase “Mai phone rakhti hu”, which was translated in the subtitles as “I am hanging up the phone now”, rather than something more closely resembling what I’d recognise as “goodbye”. Initially, this confused me, as the only time I’d ever witness that phrase being used to end a phone call would be when one party was ending the call abruptly, perhaps in anger or to be rude. As a result, I perceived the characters that used that phrase as rude or that the conversation hadn’t gone as well as the previous dialogue had indicated. However, as I continued to watch that show and others, I realised that it was a customary goodbye that just looked a bit different to what I was used to hearing, not an indication or rudeness or anger. In fact, characters who didn’t use that phrase were more likely to be perceived as rude by other characters in the show, as it’s essentially ending the call without saying goodbye. Though I was able to understand this over time, misunderstandings over cultural differences like these may inadvertently add to negative stereotypes of different groups of people.

Our aim here is too illustrate the work that can go into the process of interculturally translating even the simplest dialogue. If you’re looking to bring your media to the global stage, investing more time, money, and effort into the translation process can make the difference between a good show and a great one, as well as to avoid propagating negative cultural stereotypes.

 

References:

Lexico Dictionaries. (n.d.). Saudade: Meaning & Definition for UK English. Lexico Dictionaries | English. Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://www.lexico.com/definition/Saudade.