Translating TV Shows and Movies

Amazon Prime Distribution Platform

Since Amazon Prime Video is one of the main movie and TV show online distribution platform, so is the need for putting subtitles and translations on them. I use to translate old Babushka Russian Soviet Movies about Police and War to English and that's very hard to do since we just don't talk like that in our own native language. I try in general to tell people around me, but people don't like to listen. They're more stubborn than a cat at times.

Every single distribution these days calls for subtitles. The problem with translating films in general is that it's written by someone. A screenplay is that very thing with lines of text of what actors should say and what's going on in the scene. That leads to interpretation. What I think and what you think can be totally different. It's important for two teams to co-operate during the translation process from start to finish when translating from one language to another.

Nothing beats the original

When Everybody Loves Raymond was adapted for the Russian audience, they had to change the whole script around. The creator Phil Rosenfield was there in Russia to supervise the whole process, but I doubt he understood what was really going on because he doesn't know Russian. That, and how the Russian production team treated him like he was a piece of garbage, and everyone should hail the Russian actors from the circus. The Russian  series was called Voroniny, and it follows two families who live in two separate apartments. The original series was based in a house where the parents lived across the road from each other. The father of Raymond in the Russian series worked in a factory and took a lot of things home with him. In post soviet countries, it was common to take things home from work. I don't even think they call it stealing. In America, this would be called theft, and you could be arrested for it if caught.

The Russian version is inferior to the original.

Anyways, the whole series seemed out of place just because of the difference between Russian and American culture. It's just something you can't translate or adapt to. The original Raymond was based on Italian Americans with specific roots. The Russian series had different actors but the the same script. I've watched both and I like the original because it's the original. There's no comparison. 

I got into translating tv series and movies by a call called Igor. He wanted me to translate a hotel series from Russian to English Subtitles. I would say it was interesting because I never did something like that before, but I knew other people who could help me out too. My job was to smooth it out and make it sound interesting for the American side. This means sometimes you need to add phrasal verbs or idioms in the mix to make it sound less robotic. Of course going back and forth there were some mistakes during different revisions, the main problem is that if you go back to it 6 months later, you'll want to make more changes so you need to know when to just let it go and press the save button, and hand it in. 

You can find Igor and his new website Altertranslate over here https://altertranslate.com/. If I needed a TV show translated, I definitely would check him out.

As for translating TV Series and Movies, it's a good job which goes unnoticed. It's best to work with the person who wrote the original screenplay so there are no mis-understandings. Of course this isn't the case as this kind of work is outsourced, and the chain of communications is somewhere lost.  You have to pick up a flashlight and read the script in the dark.