Man...I've been waiting for this movie!

Time to start learning Swedish!

This kind of problem is not new to foreign films and subtitles. I've spoken French since I was 12 years old, and every single time I try to watch a French film with English subtitles (with non-Francophone friends), I end up absolutely dismayed at the quality of the translations. I'm not sure that there's really a way to fix this-- unless the producers/directors/writers became angry and argued that their work was being misrepresented, and therefore was damaging their reputation as creators, I see no other way out. I know that for visual artists, VARA lets them sue when their work is displayed in a negative, damaging light, or in a way that jeopardizes their reputation, but I'm not sure how this works with film. Either way, the producers/directors/writers may have signed a distribution contract that doesn't allow them to have any say.

I absoLUTELY agree. I began this movie with the English dubbing and the voices were driving me crazy. They were chipper cartoon voices and were not jiving with the visual mood of the film. I switched over to english subtitles and the original swedish dialogue and was blown away at the difference. It immediately made sense. I recommended this movie to EVERYONE and cautioned against the awful English dubbing.

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So not only did you not pirate the film, and shell out good money, but you essentially got a less-than-pirate quality product.

Uhh, I just watched the Blu-ray release on Sunday and it has the original subtitles (as indicated in the left-hand screens)...

bittorrent ftw on this one

This is one of the few times, where I actually wish there WAS a fansub...

@Jessy Irwin: I work as a translator and often write subtitles, so I do feel obligated to comment:

Subtitles have hard limitations on their length (usually by an amount of characters), and it can be very difficult to do justice to the source material in the space allotted. I'm constantly faced with the very difficult choice of what to remove from the source text to fit the space limitations.

That said, this film already had a perfectly good subtitle track, so this is not at all applicable in this situation.

Anyone have an advanced screen version they want to sell me?

I bought the US DVD and noticed some of the translation was off from what I saw in the theatre. I'm even less psyched now that I see it side by side.

Very interesting movie, sad to see the legitimate US release is getting butchered on the subtitles.

@Jessy Irwin: My fiancee and I have a good friend of ours who is deaf who comes over and watches movies with us quite often, so we leave the subtitles on the tv by default. I've noticed quite often that even the english subtitles often don't match the english words being spoken. Sometimes to the point where it completely ruins a good joke (Simpsons) or leaves a major plot hole (House/Fringe).

I saw a version of this film and the subtitles were horrible. I could tell there were more nuances to the film but the subtitles were reduced to a 3rd grade reading level with a 1st grade comprehension. I didn't like the movie, though I got the gist of it. The dialog sucked.

Sadly this is not uncommon,
many times the subs/dub will be not as intelligent as what is actually being said.
An other example is Kiki Delivery Service, if you look for it on google video it is the Japanese audio with the English CC, not the subs. Almost 200 lines were added to the movie in the English dub. The original movie had a lot of silence in it and the dubber added lines anytime it was present.

well... time to wait for the inevitable fan subs to be released.

I saw this movie last week and thought it was one of the best movies that I'd seen in years. I absolutely loved it. There were some weird plot holes or inconsistencies that I was left wondering about, especially between Eli and the old man. It sounds like they might be clarified in the quality translation.

(I can't believe no one else has done it yet) The publisher didn't LET THE RIGHT ONE (translation) IN

HAHAHAHA. Okay, move along, nothing more to see here.

You think that's bad... BBC America is adding English subtitles to shows that are ALREADY IN ENGLISH. I tried to watch "Ashes to Ashes" Friday night and couldn't get past the distraction. WTF is the point of simply transcribing what they're saying, if you're assuming that people don't understand it? Spelling out British slang on the screen is not going to help anyone UNDERSTAND the slang, is it? It's kind of like using Spanish subtitles on a show that's already in Spanish. How does that help?

hehe I watched the cheesy english audio dubbed bluray :D

movie is pretty cool

Well this blows..hard. I was so close to picking it up on Sunday..thank god Best Buy's price gave me second thought to an impulse buy.

@Aussiedogz: Download it from bittorrent, you'll get the good subtitles.

This is where piracy should be used to ensure a quality end product for the consumer and punish a distributor for f'ing up a good product....

yeah supposedly there's somehow some US copies with proper subs, I haven't checked my copy yet but I prempteively sent a email to dvd@magpictures.com demanding a reissue with rpoper subs. Supposedly magnolia may have had to pay the orginal swedish sub writer specifically for her work and decided to go with a cheap route. well now their getting a ton of bad PR. and even worse making potential viewers steer clear of teh DVD ruining any good faith they had on release. Supposedly the pretty bad english dub does have teh correct lines though. I was going to screen this for friends this weekend. I'll download the screener for now.

I wanted to buy this. Glad I didn't.

Way to go, Magnolia.

I saw the screener through an unnamed source. Based on the quality of that translation, I hyped the movie and got friends to buy it. I picked up the Blu-Ray on release day, but haven't watched it yet.

What a let down.

It's not all that uncommon. I like to watch movies with the subtitles (the things I do now that I have kids...) and most dubbed films have subtitles that don't match. The gist is the same but they're distracting.

Saw this in theaters. Glad I did, now I'll just have to read the book and not worry about rewatching the movie.

@Gaianna: You've totally missed the point. The movie had a good subtitle track in the theatrical release. A consumer purchasing the DVD expects the theatrical release, but they're getting something worse.

I'm a translator (although I don't do movies) and I think there are a number of things possibly at work here. First of all, there may have been a rights issue that prevented them from using the original translation. I've actually had to retranslate video games, manuals, and other things that had perfectly good English translations done for other regions simply because the people publishing the new version didn't have the rights to the old translation. And this has already been mentioned, but subtitles usually have very strict length limits. Probably the original screener wasn't done with those limits in mind. I can tell you from years of video game translation that being limited in the number of characters you can use often makes it impossible to include all of the nuances you'd like.

One other thing I think should be mentioned is that nowhere does the author of the article talk about what the actual Swedish means. It's all about how inferior the new English sounds compared to the old version (and I admit that it doesn't seem as good). But I think it's more than a little strange to judge the quality of a translation without knowing what the original says.

@oneswellfoop: the movie is a great film.

Fuck twilight.

@icruise I can understand your second point, but I worry about the film creator's original work being distorted through a bad game of subtitle "telephone", where the perfectly good film in the original language is turned into a high quality, subtitled film in English, and then into a miserably subtitled film in English. I don't know much about character limits in subtitling, but I feel that the OP has an excellent point about how much the movie is degraded by the sub-part subtitles. I understand the issues with having rights to the first set of subtitles, but for any of the screenshots that accompany the article, were there any character limit guidelines that were broken by the original translation? If not (or of those rules depend on some other outside variable of which I am ignorant), I can't possibly imagine why there would be such a great disparity between the two.

@icruise: You mentioned video games, so I assume you do Japanese-English as well?

If so, we should get in touch (I mostly do video games also) if at all possible. Always nice to know somebody else in the field.

@dmk2113: Also, I should note: I do Japanese-English.

@Jessy Irwin:
Good call (on your first post).

As much as the Consumerist 'take them down a peg' side of me wants to cry foul here, shouldn't we only really be concerned if the writer/director/etc. sees a problem?

If these folks don't see any threat to their artistic vision - they would know - then why don't we just shut up about it?

BUT, IF THEY DO....then by all means, release the hounds!

The same happens in reverse, too: I remember seeing that awful movie Kids in a cinema in Switzerland, in English. In one line, the kid says something like "...and then I took her out for a corn dog." The German subtitle translation literally said "...habe ich ihr zu einem Getreidehund eingeladen" -- "...I invited her out for a dog made of grains." (Remember, "corn" used to mean "grain".)

Talk about "lost in translation"!!!

I loved this movie and its a shame that it isn't being represented in the same quality as I watched it in.

Its stupid moves like this that make me want to punch whoever made the decision to do this. This is one of the few movies that really needs a good translation for it to be fully effective.

@redskull: "Knulla de" is not a friendly greeting like my friend had told me. No wonder Simrishamn was scared of the only American in town.

Just bought this movie a couple of hours ago, it was supposed to be tonight's family surprise. Good thing I didn't open it, it's getting returned tomorrow.

@wickedpixel:

Thank you, knew somebody would suggest violating the rights of the film producer.

Nice to see the legit imports are stooping to the quality level of foreign bootlegs now. But this is an interesting consumer issue, because these region issues are tearing apart a lot of media imports. This is part of a much larger problem than just cheap subbing.

Sounds like a problem for the internet to solve. Although the most efficient way would involve torrenting the film with community-improved hard-coded subs

I just received this via Netflix today, haven't even opened it yet. I speak Swedish enough to figure it out, and my girlfriend is a bilingual native of Sweden. We'll see how bad they messed it up.

I got it from Netflix without having seen it in the theater. The subtitles didn't ruin the movie for me, since I had no other comparison and Swedish is Greek to me. For me, the movie was great enough that if a properly subbed version is released, I'll definitely buy it to watch again, but I was plenty satisfied with it. Maybe (as the article title implies) that makes me dumb, but hey, I like what I like.

As a film geek who watches far more 'foreign' films than English language ones, the subtitle issue isn't a problem at all.

There are many free online 'subtitle' sites where you can find this film's original subs. Google is your friend. Just download the original .srt or .sub file to this film. Subtitles are just a small text file, after all - its not rocket science.

I'm contacting Netflix - they must have some clout. I want to watch this movie, but with its original translation.

Another captioner/subtitler chiming in here. Not everything can be translated in a way that preserves the emotion and music of the original language, whether in dubbing or subtitling. And yes, technical limitations also make it difficult, both in language subtitling and captioning for the deaf and hearing impaired. A good captioner will try to make choices that conveys the most important part of the dialogue, but sometimes there is no choice but to cut something out.

That's not to excuse lousy captioning and subtitling, however.

I apparently downloaded the right version (with the correct subtitles).

GREAT film btw.

WHat annoys me the most is that good foreign films dont even make it to the US market. ANd here in the biblebelt even some US films dont even make it here (because they would offend delicate sensibilities of the people around here).

That's a TON of good films people are not exposed to.

I am having to search the internet & download them illegally just to see them!

So glad I didn't buy the DVD yet.

W E I R D . . . What a COINCIDENCE!

Was trying to watch a Korean DVD rental last night "Pailan-Failan" and I had this EXACT SAME problem. There would be stretches of conversations with no subtitles and where there were subs, the gaps in the conversations rendered them useless. It was like trying to solve a puzzle. After 10 minutes, I gave up.

Well I also tried it on my MacBook. Same results.

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dmk2113 @ dmk2113 : Also, I should note: I do Japanese-English.
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Image of SchuylerH SchuylerH
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"Another captioner/subtitler chiming in here. Not everything can be translated in a way that preserves the emotion and music of the original language, whether in dubbing or subtitling."

This is why I prefer subtitling to dubbing, even if the subtitles aren't great. I can hear all the inflections and tonal variations in the original language. Even if I don't understand the words, I understand the emotion better.

Also, I can't stand it when the words don't match their lips moving. Even when it's in English, that's annoying. Hear me, you CGI turkeys who messed up Dr. Manhattan!? Gaaaa!