Henrik Gottlieb introduced the concept of ‘diagonal translation’ in his essay “Subtitling: Diagonal Translation,” which first appeared in the January 1994 issue of Prospectives–Studies in Translatology. The term refers to the fact that subtitling involves moving between languages and mediums at the same time, since spoken dialogue has to be rendered as readable text; in a sense, the language undergoes two transformations simultaneously. The paper’s abstract reads as follows:
Subtitling of televised foreign‐language material not only changes language; it also switches from the spoken to the written mode, and it presents itself ‘in real time’, as a dynamic text type. Hence, due to the complex, ‘diagonal’ nature of subtitling, the subtitler must possess the musical ears of an interpreter, the stylistic sensitivity of a literary translator, the visual acuteness of a film cutter, and the esthetic sense of a book designer. The author discusses subtitling in the context of language transfer, and suggests nine basic fields to consider when creating ‐ and evaluating ‐ interlingual subtitles for television and video.
Gottlieb, Henrik. (1994). Subtitling: Diagonal Translation. Perspectives-Studies in Translatology. 2. 101-121. 10.1080/0907676X.1994.9961227.
I’m going to go ahead and say it: personally, I think that’s overstating things. Certainly, it requires creativity and a deft command of language (at least, if you’re to do it well). But, in my experience, subtitling is a lot like scrapbooking in a small album: you trim things down and move them around until you find a creative arrangement that’s representative of whatever you started with but–inevitably–things get lost.
That said, there are certainly ‘bad subs’–subtitles that are misleading, hard to follow, go by too fast to read, or are just plain wrong–and there are ‘good subs’–ones that manage to preserve the original content to the greatest degree possible and creatively work around limitations–but there are no ‘right subs’ any more than there is such a thing as ‘the correct translation.’ No language maps perfectly onto another, so translation in any form is an inherently transcreative process; there’s room for multiple interpretations–or rather, there are only interpretations* (one word utterances and whatnot aside).
*n.b. For a brilliant illustration of this, see this 2017 interview with the inimitable Emily Wilson.In this post, I’m going to attempt to touch on what gets lost and why, what gets modified, some common mistakes, as well as a few creative solutions I’ve encountered–hopefully without making anyone’s eyes glaze over. I’ll be pulling examples from the shows covered on this site and a few from other places, which I’ll do my best to contextualize as needed. If you’ve ever been curious why the subs you’re reading clearly don’t match what’s happening onscreen, or if there really isn’t a better solution...this post is for you.
※Contains spoilers
The Constraints
The specifics of formatting and other regulations will vary a bit depending on 1) who is commissioning the subs and 2) who they’re being produced for–for example, the BBC have a style guide for subtitling foreign language programmes and another for subtitling English programming for the hard of hearing–but, in general, the following applies:
Space
There are several ways in which space becomes an issue when subtitling. Firstly, there is a limited number of characters allotted per sub, dictated largely by timing constraints (see below). What’s more, spaces between words and punctuation marks count in the total tally. Secondly, the text can’t obscure or distract from whatever is happening on-screen; viewers can’t be so busy reading the subs they miss whatever it is they’re watching. Thirdly, even if the dialogue continues in voiceover, if the scene cuts out, so should the sub (particularly if there’s a thematic change).
Generally speaking:
- Around 30-35 characters (Eng) or 14 hanzi (Ch) per line
- No more than 2 sentences per subtitle
- Maximum of two lines, bottom line longer where possible
- Avoid consecutive double-line subs
- Subs should cut out before scene cut
So, if you max-out your character allotment in a two line sub, that means you have a total of 70 characters to work with–which sounds like a lot...until you get counting. As you can imagine, this becomes even trickier when multiple people are speaking at once, especially if some of them are off-screen.
Timing
The second major concern when it comes to subtitling is timing. Eye tracking studies have determined that the reading speed of the ‘average’ viewer for a text of ‘average’ complexity is somewhere between 2.33-2.5 words per second. Factoring in the 0.25-0.5 seconds the brain needs to process what the eye has read, that works out to about 6 seconds for a two-line subtitle. Again, it shouldn’t take a viewer so long to read the sub they miss what’s happening on-screen.
Generally speaking:
- Minimum 1.5 sec duration (for a one-word sub)
- About 6 sec for a 2 line subtitle (slower for children’s programming)
- Subs should start 0.25 sec after the start of an utterance
- Subs should remain no more than 2 sec after the end of an utterance
- Leave about 0.25 sec between subs to avoid ‘overlay’*
*Since there’s a ~0.25 sec processing delay, if you don’t leave at least that much time between when subs display on the screen, they’ll appear to run together.
SOV vs SVO
“Around the survivors a perimeter create.” ~ Yoda, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
There’s an additional element to translation between Korean/Japanese and English: the underlying syntaxes of the languages differ. English is what’s known as a [S]VO language (subject-verb-object), whereas Korean and Japanese are both [S]OV languages (subject-object-verb). In other words, it’s convention to speak like Yoda in the above example; that is essentially the natural order of sentence elements in head-final languages. This means that, if an utterance has to be split into multiple subs, the two halves will often get flipped, or–if it’s in more than two parts–shuffled.
To pull an example from Snowdrop, this is what Soo-ho says when he gives Young-ro the dove necklace at the top of EP04:
“It’s because I feel like I can only leave without worrying if you’re wearing this necklace.”
영로 씨가 이 목걸이를 하고 있어야 | 걱정하지 않고 | 떠날 수 있을 거 같아서요.
“Young-ro-ssi has to be wearing this necklace | without worrying | seems like [I’ll] be able to leave is why.”Disney+ subs:
~ Snowdrop EP04
I think I can only leave... | without worrying about you | when I know you’re wearing it.
As you can see, while the middle of the sentence stays where it is, the part about leaving and the part about wearing the necklace get flipped. This is why you’ll sometimes see FMVs and whatnot with sound overlays...only the person didn’t grab the section of dialogue they thought they did.
The reversal of VO and OV is also a consideration when translating song lyrics, for example, as a phrase will often stretch over several lines and the segments of translated text will need to be broken up and re-arranged.
‘Compactness’ of a Language
This is yet another element involved in subtitling languages that make use of Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese). When moving between a language in which an array of concepts can be represented by a single character and a phonetic language where those same concepts have to literally be spelt out, things inevitably get a lot longer. Here is an example:
持病 (2) > 지병 (2) > ‘jibyeong’ (8) > chronic illness (15)
The hanja here mean ‘carry-disease’–in other words, an ailment one carries persistently. Written in the phonetic Korean hangeul, this becomes 지병. Romanized, those two units get expanded to eight: jibyeong. Translated, this becomes ‘chronic illness,’ which, including the space between words, comes out to 15 characters–and that’s one word (originally). If you take a look at some of the character quotes pages, you’ll see immediately how much longer the English translation is than the original Korean. This is why.
What Drops Out?
Given the above constraints, it’s unavoidable that things get pared down wherever possible. But how do you decide where to start cutting? What drops first?
Speech Disfluencies
The very first things to drop out are speech disfluencies. This includes things like hesitation markers, false starts, repetition or corrections, filled pauses, interjections, exiting/qualifying terms, etc. Which makes sense. Most of the time, excess ‘erms’ and ‘ums’ and whatnot could stand to be omitted from the utterance, as well. If you look at one of our LIVE translations, we’ve actually preserved many of the speech disfluencies, since the original dialogue was largely unscripted and, in this case, our goal was to reflect what was happening in the Korean–as opposed to say, if we had been commissioned to produce a clean transcript of the LIVE in English (in which case, we would have approached the translation differently).
This comes up fairly often when translating Japanese dialogue, since Japanese uses aizuchi (相槌), short interjections whose main function is to let a speaker know that you’re listening and following along with what they’re saying. Even if the words have meaning, since they’re essentially serving the same purpose as nodding along, they’ll often drop out.
Discourse Markers & ‘Padding Expressions’
Spoken language is peppered with what we call discourse markers, which serve to connect, organise, or qualify our speech in some way. This helps a listener follow the flow of the conversation and/or elucidates the speaker’s attitude towards what they’re saying, but often doesn’t change much in terms of the overall meaning of what’s being said.
To give an intralingual example:
“Actually, I’ve just arrived.” > I just got here.
Semantically, not much is lost here; this would be considered an acceptable sub by most standards.
To give an interlingual example: if you’ve read the notes on Hye-ryeong’s character profile, you may have seen that she has a habit of using the English word ‘Anyway’ as a conversation opener or segue, giving her speech a bit of a hip/modern flare to off-set the way she often speaks in saturi (regional dialect). Even though this verbal tic illustrates something about her character, since it’s essentially a filler (and doesn’t always make sense in English), it dropped out of the Disney+ subs entirely.
Here’s a snatch of dialogue from EP03 when the girls are strategizing about how to sneak Soo-ho out of the dorm on the day of the Open House...with all the ANSP agents camped right outside:
...헉! 애니웨이. 너 그 남자 옷은 어떻게 할 거야? 그 꼴로 나가면 바로 붙잡혀! 다들 양복 쫙 빼입고 올 텐데.“...*Gasp*! Anyway. What are you going to do about his clothes? If he goes out looking like that, he’ll get caught right away! Everyone’s bound to come dressed-up in suits.”
Disney+ subs:
n.b. ‘like that’ is referring to the fact that Soo-ho’s clothes are matted with blood from his wounds–and casual besides. ~ Snowdrop EP03
What will you do about his clothes? | He’ll get caught if he wears his. | Everyone will wear a suit.
Since the ‘Anyway’ didn’t contribute anything to the overall meaning of the phrase, it dropped out.
Tautological & Cumulative Adverbs/Adjectives, etc.
This is essentially a fancy way of saying that descriptive redundancies and unnecessary emphasis markers get dropped.
To give an intralingual example:
“a really long time ago” > long ago
Semantically, the ‘really’ doesn’t add enough meaning to warrant preserving, and the word ‘ago’ is inherently temporal, so there’s no need to explicitly say ‘time.’
Tone/Register
Tone and register contribute a lot in terms of understanding a speaker’s personality, station, attitude, and/or relationship to a referent or addressee, but often preserving them isn’t an option. For instance, as a rule, the more polite the statement, the longer the utterance.
To give an intralingual example:
“If you would be so kind as to ~” > Could you ~? >> Can you ~?
You can imagine what sort of person might prefer the former phrasing to the latter: a matron, a diplomat, a hotelier, or even someone using the phrase sarcastically. But, in a subtitle, where letters are at a premium, this often gets stripped out.
n.b. As a related aside, it’s common across languages for more formal phrasing to be longer and more casual speech to be more succinct. In fact, the word for ‘casual speech’ in Korean, banmal (반말) literally means ‘half-word(s).’This also applies to things like archaic speech, Japanese yakuwarigo (役割語), and the use of formal/humble vs casual/neutral language. So it can be jarring when, for instance, you have a character criticizing a superior in very formal and deferential language coming across like a teenage rebel in the subs.
What Gets Changed?
Expletives
In professional subtitling, the general rule of thumb is: when in doubt, tone it down. There’s an example of this in EP06 of Snowdrop when Young-ro finally hits her breaking point and curses Soo-ho out for dictating which hostages get released and which remain:
그만해! 니가 뭔데 사람 목숨을 좌지우지해? 내가 남으면 되잖아. 내가 남을 테니까 다 풀어줘. 다 풀어 달라고! (…) 니가 나가. 여긴 우리 기숙사야. 우리 기숙사라고 이 빨갱이 새끼야!
“Stop it! Who are you to decide who lives or dies*? It’s fine if I stay, right? I’ll stay, so release them all. Release them all! (…) You get out. This is our dorm. It’s our dorm you commie (lit. red) bastard!”
Disney+ subs:
Stop! | Who are you to decide who gets to live? | Only I will be enough. | I’ll stay, so release all of them. | Let them all go! (…) You leave. | This is our dorm. | This is our dorm, you stupid communist![*Literally: ‘to control people’s lives.’ In this case, not so much how they live them, but whether they live them, since it’s presumed the hostages are likely to die.]
~ Snowdrop EP06
So, she full-on curses him out, but that got toned down considerably in the Disney+ subs.
Wordplay
As someone who loves wordplay, this one pains me dearly, even if I recognise that it’s unavoidable. Wordplay is based so inherently on the way a given language behaves that it’s often impossible to preserve as-is in the process of translation.
Writer Kim Eun-sook is a genius at wordplay and uses it extensively in her scripts–often to great comedic or poignant effect. For those familiar, Descendants of the Sun (2016), Goblin (2016-2017), and Mr. Sunshine (2018) are all projects of hers. Someone actually put together a couple of videos [part 1 | part 2]* highlighting the way she plays with language in Mr. Sunshine. The subs are colored and hard-coded, so even if you can’t understand the dialogue, you can appreciate a bit of what’s going on linguistically.
*n.b. If anyone’s interested, I would gladly do a post pulling these apart.I’ll pull out one example and explain it here, though, since they really are clever. To contextualize a bit, Mr. Sunshine takes place in the years leading up to the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945) when all sorts of foreign governments were jockeying for a foothold in the Korean Peninsula. This bit of dialogue takes place after the heroine, Ae-shin, recognises a man brought to meet Eun-san, her commander in the Righteous Army, from an old photograph of her parents–both of who were killed not long after she was born. When she confronts Eun-san about the man, asking if he’s responsible for her parents’ deaths, they have the following exchange:
황은산: 아무것도 물어선 안 된다고 안 배우셨습니까?
고애신: 아무것도 묻지 마라. 실패한 거사는 돌아보지 마라. 불명예도 각오하는 일이다. 틀기면 튄다. 잡히면 죽는다. 죽으면 묻는다. 해서 나는...내아버지, 어머니의 죽음을 지금도 물을 수 없는 것인가?Eun-san: Did you not learn that you’re not to ask anything?
Ae-shin: ‘Do not ask anything.’ ‘Do not look back on failed insurrections.’ ‘Be prepared, too, for disgrace.’ ‘If you’re discovered, you run. If you’re caught, you die. If you die, you’re buried.’ Therefore am I...still unable to ask after my father and mother’s deaths?Netflix subs:
~ Mr. Sunshine EP15 [clip]
Eun-san: Didn’t he teach you not to ask any questions?
Ae-shin: “Don’t ask any questions. | Don’t look back on failed missions. | You must accept disgrace. | Run if you’re caught. | Get caught and you die. Die and you’ll be forgotten.” | Is that why | I’m still not allowed to know | how my parents died?
In Korean, the verbs ask (묻다) and bury (묻다) are written the same (though they conjugate differently). What’s more, the phrase ‘chaegim-eul mutda’ (책임을 묻다) literally translates to ‘ask responsibility’ but actually means something closer to ‘hold accountable.’ Therefore, she’s asking for the truth of how her parents died, but also if she’s not allowed to hold the man responsible for their deaths accountable. So, the word ‘mutda’ (묻다) is being used three different ways here. Like I said, it’s incredibly clever. The Netflix subs were able to largely preserve the meaning, but the ingenuity of the phrasing gets lost.
A more humourous example of wordplay appears in EP03 of Tale of the Nine Tailed. Half-brothers Rang and Yeon get into a physical fight–and throw in some verbal sparring while they’re at it. The funny part is that Yeon is a gumiho and Rang is half-gumiho, half-human, making them both foxes (i.e. canids). Combined with the fact that tacking ‘dog’ (개) onto the word ‘child’ (새끼) gives you the equivalent of ‘son of a b*tch’ in Korean, the following exchange is quite witty:
이랑: 이건 가정폭력이다 너?
이연: 원래 호로자식은 좀 패면서 키우라는데, 내가 그걸 못해서 여우새끼를 개새끼로 키웠잖니.
이랑: 그 새끼 거리로 내몬 놈이 누군데? 틈만 나면 유기견 취급이네.
이연: 내 동생, 올 크리스마스엔 입마개 선물해줘야겠네.Rang: This is domestic violence, you know?
Yeon: They say you’re supposed to raise wild children with a firm hand, but I couldn’t do that, so I ended up raising a fox-child into a dog-child (son of a bitch), didn’t I?
Rang: And who was the jerk who kicked that child (SOB) to the curb? You treat me like a stray dog any chance you get.
Yeon: My little brother, I’ll have to gift you a muzzle this Christmas.Fan subs:
n.b. ‘fox child’ can also be used to mean something like ‘sly bastard.’ We took a closer look at this line in our EP03 breakdown. ~ Tale of the Nine Tailed EP03
Rang: This is domestic violence, you know.
Yeon: When a child doesn’t behave, it’s best to give them a beating. | But because I failed to do that, you ended up becoming a jerk.
Rang: You keep blaming it on me... | when you were the one who turned me into an orphan.
Yeon: I should get you a mouth guard for Christmas this year.
As you can see, the whole bit about dogs and foxes got stripped out of the subs entirely, which created a few problems in the following dialogue. For one thing, the way Rang’s second line is subbed makes it sound as though Yeon orphaned him (as in, killed his parents), and the part about being treated like a stray dog isn’t subbed at all. More to the point, ‘muzzle’ became ‘mouthguard’–two things which, in purpose, are diametrically opposed. A muzzle serves to protect the world from Rang, whereas a mouthguard serves to protect Rang. Also, in the English, it comes across as a total non-sequitur. This is a case where, with a bit of finesse, I think at least some of the canid jokes could have been preserved–but, alas.
Here’s an example of wordplay from EP01 of Snowdrop that involves mashing a Korean word up with a loan word. In this case, the Korean word halabeoji (‘grandpa’; often used to mean ‘old man’) gets mashed with MacGyver (1985):
은영로: 거봐, 내 말이 맞지? 못 고치는 거 못 따는 거 없으시다니까!
김만동: 아유, 그럼, 그럼. 이 할아비가 맥가이버 뺨치는 할가이버잖여, 어.Young-ro: See, wasn’t I right? I’m telling you there’s nothing he can’t fix or unlock!
Man-dong: Auff, of course, of course. This gramps (halabeoji) is a HalGyver that can outdo MacGyver, eh.Disney+ subs:
~ Snowdrop EP01
Young-ro: I told you he would. | He can fix or unlock anything.
Man-dong: Of course. | I may be old, but I’m a jack of all trades.
As you can see, the Disney+ subs opted to work around this wordplay completely. I’m not sure if they thought their target demographic wouldn’t get the reference (even though MacGyver got a reboot in 2016), or what. Honestly, I think something like ‘GrampGyver’ would have been a fine alternative.
Humour
Yes, sadly, some of the funny gets lost, or–if the subtitler is up to scratch–changed, at the very least. Sometimes this is because broader cultural context is required to understand why something is funny, or because what makes it funny is somehow difficult to replicate in English.
Here’s an example from EP01 of TotNT that involves a little of both. When Yeon first goes to the Afterlife Immigration Office to report to Taluipa that he’s taken care of Yeou Nui, as per his ongoing contract with the Ten Kings, they have the following exchange:
이연: 병역의 의무가 600년 넘게 계속 되는데, 내가 안 미치고 배겨?
탈의파: ‘병역의 의무’? 야. 산신 자리 내팽겨치고 이리 살라고 누가 등 떠밀었냐? 그 계집아이의 환생을 조건으로 몸빵을 택한 거는 너야! (…) 라잇 나우...제대할래?Yeon: My compulsory military service has gone on for over 600 years. How could I stand to not go crazy?
Taluipa: ‘Compulsory military service’? Oi. Did someone push you into ditching your position as a mountain god to live like this? You’re the one who chose manual labour in exchange for that girl’s rebirth! (…) Right now...care to be discharged?”Fan subs:
~ Tale of the Nine Tailed EP01
Yeon: How can one not lose it... | after following orders as a soldier for 600 years?
Taluipa: As a soldier? | Nobody forced you to give up... | being a mountain spirit and live this way. | You’re the one who chose this life... | in return for that girl’s resurrection. (…) So tell me... | Do you want your freedom back?
Firstly, this requires some cultural context. Yeon’s line about compulsory military service is mildly hilarious when you consider that Korean men are required to complete 2 years of military service, and even that often feels like an eternity. Hence, to a Korean viewer, the idea of 600 years of it just sounds exceptionally cruel. This is one of many modern references Yeon makes that sound funny coming from a 1636+ year old gumiho.
Adding to the humour, Taluipa runs with his analogy, asking if he wants to be discharged. What gets lost in translation (into English at least) is that the ‘right now’ is already in English (라잇 나우). This is kind of like an English speaker opting to use the word ‘capisce?’ instead of ‘you get me?’ It just adds a little extra colour. There’s no way to reflect that, though, since the entire conversation is now in English. (I suppose you could use ‘ahora’ or some such, but the overall impression that creates is somewhat different).
As an aside, apparently Deadpool (2016) was a box office hit in Korea, with people actually going out of their way to praise the subtitles. I haven’t seen the movie, but I gather it’s heavy on humour, meta, and breaking the fourth wall, so I’d consider that quite the feat.
Ideo-Cultural References
This one likely comes as no surprise, but anything that requires cultural or linguistic knowledge inevitably gets lost in subtitling, where the name of the game is paring things down. In some rare instances there are ways to work it in, but mostly these sorts of things undergo cultural transposition or are skirted entirely.
Here’s an example that follows right on the heels of the above bit of dialogue:
할멈은, 지옥 갈 거야. 내가 정화수 떠놓고 빌 거야.
“Halmeom, you’re going to hell. I’ll draw well water at dawn and pray for it.”
Fan sub: You’ll end up in the Underworld. | I’ll pray for it every day.
n.b. ‘Halmeom’ = ‘granny,’ which is what Yeon calls Taluipa. ~ Tale of the Nine Tailed EP01
Firstly, the Underworld (명부), the Afterlife (저승), and hell (지옥) are three different words, in addition to being three distinct concepts tied to broader mythologies whose differences are actually relevant in the world of TotNT. Taluipa’s job takes her to the Underworld all the time, so this is not much of a threat. Yeon uses the word ‘hell’ here, of which there are many–none of them pleasant.
The part I really wanted to address, though, is the phrase ‘well water at dawn.’ The word is ‘jeonghwasu’ (井華水), which refers to the practice of drawing well water at dawn and using it to decoct remedies or whatnot while offering prayers to Jowang. Both the phrase and the practice are typically used/performed exclusively by elderly people these days, so it also serves to make Yeon sound like the 1636+ year old grandpa that he is. Obviously, this is all but impossible to capture in a sub.
Idioms can also be tricky to handle. Here’s an example of an idiomatic expression involving the concept of ‘nunchi’ (explained below). In EP04 of Snowdrop, Young-ro’s roommates throw her a last hurrah the night before she’s due to be kicked out of the dorm and commiserate over the fact that she’ll have to move in with her estranged father and shrew of a stepmother. Young-ro tries to downplay how uncomfortable this is going to be, given how contentious her relationship with her stepmother is:
아, 아유 괜찮아요~ 눈칫밥 먹고 살 빠지면 좋죠, 뭐. 건배!
“Ah, augh, it’s all right~ I’ll eat salt and lose weight so it’s all good, I guess. Cheers!”
Disney+ subs:
~ Snowdrop EP04
Come on. I’m all right. | I’ll be glad if I lose weight walking on eggshells. | Cheers!
The Korean phrase here is ‘nunchitbab-eul meokda’ (눈칫밥을 먹다) which literally means ‘to eat nunchi-rice’ where ‘nunchi’ refers to tact, sense, or [social] awareness. Idiomatically, that works out to eating a meal/being a guest where one is aware one is unwelcome. Semantically, the sub is pretty close, but it doesn’t make much sense when combined with the bit about losing weight. (Admittedly, I’m not sure that ‘eat salt’ is a much better option–just an alternate one).
Common Mistakes
All of that being said, there is such a thing as ‘wrong’ subs–subtitles that depart so far from the original utterance they mean something else entirely, or are problematic in other ways.
There are also ‘bad’ subs–*keikaku means plan being one infamous example. This fan sub became a meme, went all over the internet, spawned parodies, and even sparked a line of merchandise. And there are plenty more like it. If you want a laugh, Google image search ‘bad subtitles.’ Most of the hits you’ll get back will be fan subs gone wrong. There are occasional examples, however, of professional subs–like the original Japanese subtitles for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)–that arguably fall into this category.
In general, I’d say fan subs are the most problematic, as they’re not subject to any sort of quality review, nor are the subtitlers who generate them. Viki technically falls into this category but, since a group of fan subbers will work together on the translation, most of the mistakes get weeded out...eventually. Netflix translators have to demonstrate some degree of ability and comply with industry conventions, but I’ve found their overall quality to be middling–some are quite good, others less so. Often, every episode in a show will be translated by a different person, leading to inconsistencies due to unfamiliarity with the full body of material. Disney generally has a higher standard when it comes to internationalising anything they own the rights to (for example, they actually re-dubbed the three Studio Ghibli films that had been previously dubbed in English by Streamline Pictures when they formed an exclusive contract with Ghibli in 1996), but I still spot mistakes here and there. To be fair, in 24hrs of content, there’s bound to be at least one–subtitlers are human, too.
That being said, when it comes to working between Korean/Japanese and English, there are a few common ‘buckets’ genuine mistakes tend to fall into:
Misattribution
In both Korean and Japanese, the referent (e.g. who is performing a given action) is often left unstated, since this information can generally be inferred from the way the verb inflects, the broader context in which the utterance is made, etc. Due to this fact, subtitlers will sometimes attribute actions and whatnot to the wrong people, which can be either confusing or misleading depending on the circumstance.
There’s an example of this the EP12 subs for Snowdrop. Soo-ho offers Young-ro reassurance that everyone’s going to be all right in the end, harkening back to a conversation they’d had in EP03 when she’d said she could enjoy the Open House properly next year. She’d hinted she would invite him as a guest next time (instead of merely using the chaos as part of their exit strategy), and Soo-ho had never replied–because he knew, even then, it wouldn’t be possible. However, in the Disney+ subs, the subtitler used ‘we’ instead of ‘you (plural)’ changing the meaning in a misleading way:
내가 넌, 반드시 지켜 줄게. ...친구들도 언니들도 전부 다 무사할 거야. 다음 오픈 하우스 때는 재미있는 게임도 하고 춤도 추고.. 해야지.
“I’ll be sure to protect you. ...[Your] friends and [your] eonnies will all be unharmed, too. At the next Open House [you] have to play fun games and dance–right?”
Disney+ subs:
~ Snowdrop EP12
I promise | I’ll keep you safe. | Everyone including your friends | will be all right. | At the next Open House, | we should play fun games and dance together. | Right?
I’ve added in the brackets so you can see how Soo-ho only actually says the word ‘you’ (너) in the first sentence. In the following two sentences, the you/your is merely implied. In the third sentence, he’s saying ‘you (plural) have to dance and play games,’ but the pronoun drops out, since he’s speaking directly to Young-ro and has just mentioned her friends and eonnies in the previous sentence. (The word ‘together’ doesn’t appear at all).
In other words, he’s not including himself in this statement. Whether he dies or returns to North Korea, there is no version of the universe Soo-ho can imagine at this point where he’s in Seoul the following December and welcome as a guest at the dormitory full of people he’s been holding hostage for five days. But, in the subtitle, it looks like he’s either deluded or giving her false hope everything will magically be all right (this is not that Disney).
Here’s a different example from TotNT where the referent is stated, but misconstrued. On Eohwa Island, Yeon barges into the local market owner’s private quarters to find yet another false Dragon King scroll on the wall, and says:
이것들 봐라. 여기도 있네.
“Check these people out. There’s [one] here, too.”
Fan subs: Look at this. | It’s here, too.
~ Tale of the Nine Tailed EP03
I do understand the confusion, since what he says is, “Check out i-geot-deul,” which literally means ‘these things,’ but it’s being used here as a disparaging way to refer to the villagers. The following sentence, “There’s [one] here, too,” actually is referring to the scroll, though–again–the referent is not expressly stated. It’s needless, since he’s staring right at the scroll he’s just found, after having found two others in different homes on the island.
Misconstruing of Terms
Every once in a while, there’s a term that just doesn’t mean what the subtitler thought it meant. Which is why it’s important for a translator to have–at the very least–a strong enough grasp of their source language to know when there’s something they’re missing. Often, I’ll look things up even when I’m fairly certain I know what they mean, just to be sure.
There’s a pretty egregious example of this in the EP03 fan subs of Tale of the Nine Tailed. Yeon senses Rang’s presence and lobs a rock at him, which Rang catches. They then have the following exchange:
이랑: 캐치볼 같은 거 하기에는 너무 늙지 않았나?
이연: 그러기엔 우리 사이 너무 막장이지. 난 데드볼이었는데.Rang: Aren’t we too old to do something like play catch?
Yeon: Our relationship is too makjang for that. I [meant for that to be] a deadball.Fan subs:
~ Tale of the Nine Tailed EP03
Rang: Aren’t we too old to play catch?
Yeon: We hate each other too much to play catch. | I actually meant to kill you.
As you can see, that sub went sideways. The word ‘deadball’ (데드볼) here is in English, but it doesn’t mean ‘a ball meant to kill someone.’ This is a Korean baseball term for a pitch that hits a player (typically causing the game to be paused). Yeon is just saying he meant for the ‘ball’ to hit Rang, rather than for Rang to catch it. Not that he meant to kill his brother.
The word makjang also gets used. This is a coined word taken from the phrase ‘the final scene’ (‘majimak jangmyeon’) that has come to refer to an entire genre, as well as particular dramatic elements or conventions of Korean storytelling. When Yeon says his relationship with Rang is ‘makjang,’ he’s essentially saying it’s overly fraught...which is true enough.
Unfortunately, it seems this sub went all over the internet and got a lot of people up in arms.
Mis-specification of Hypernyms
Sometimes also called ‘superordinates,’ hypernyms are basically umbrella categories under which more specific words fall. For example, ‘bird’ would be a hypernym of dove, raven, falcon, etc. Sometimes in the original dialogue, a hypernym will get used, but the subtitler will substitue a word that is wrong due to its specificity–often because they feel it sounds more natural.
For example, in Japanese, the word ‘oya’ (親) means ‘parent,’ not specifying mom or dad (and sometimes meaning ‘parents’–plural). However, in English, it sounds unnatural to just say ‘my parent,’ so the subtitler will opt for a more specific word (mom, dad) or else pluralize it. If the subtitler isn’t familiar with the circumstances and family structure of whomever’s parent(s) are being referred to, however, they’ll sometimes chose the wrong word, resulting in a mis-sub.
Other
I actually watched the JTBC raws of Snowdrop first and then downloaded the Disney+ app just so I could see the subs and how the subtitler handled certain things. On the whole, I’d say they’re pretty good quality. That being said, there are a few mistakes here and there, some of which surprised me. The main one that jumped out at me was that the genders of third person pronouns (i.e. he/she, him/her) were wrong in some places, even though Korean makes this distinction linguistically.
Based on this, even if I hadn’t seen the subtitler’s name (Wayne Ryu–hats off to you, sir) I would have guessed that Chinese was their first language (I don’t know that that’s true, it’s just my guess). Why? Because, in Chinese, he/she/it are all pronounced the same (tā) even if they’re written with different hanzi (他/她/它), so Chinese speakers will sometimes drop the wrong pronoun in on the fly. Not because they’re not aware of a person’s gender, but because they’re not used to verbally making the distinction.
You can think about it like the way we don’t differentiate between inclusive and exclusive we in English. For example, in the sentence, “We’re going to eat,” ‘we’ could mean the speaker, the listener, and possibly some other people (inclusive we), or it could mean the speaker, at least one other person, but not the listener (exclusive we). That’s a significant difference, semantically, but English doesn’t make the distinction. If you were to learn a language that does make that distinction, you would have to get used to using two different words for ‘we’ and make sure not to mix them up. But you might from time to time, just out of hand.
Creative Solutions
Given all the above considerations, creativity is often key–in translation in general, but especially when it comes to subtitling, due to the additional constraints. Every once in a while I’ll encounter a sub that diverges from the literal meaning of the source language utterance, but does a great job of capturing it in some other way. Here are a few examples of subs that get full marks in my book:
In TotNT EP03, when Yeon and Ji-ah find the first of the dead fishermen (who, bizarrely, appears to have drowned on dry land) Yeon is utterly blasé about it and, in fact, cracks a joke:
오~ 되게 스페셜한 밤이었나 봐.
“Oh~ Looks like it was a really special night.”
Fan subs: I see someone threw a party.
~ Tale of the Nine Tailed EP03
‘Special’ here is in English, making him sound, if possible, even more flippant. Since that doesn’t translate tonally, I though the subtitler did a good job of replicating the spirit of what he says, which is more to the point in this case.
At the end of EP09 of Snowdrop, Cheong-ya’s cover gets blown wide open. The scene picks up at the top of EP10, and she says/thinks the following:
또 니가 문제구나. 너 때문에... 내 정체가 드러나 버렸어.
“Again, you’re the problem. Because of you...” My identity has been exposed.
Disney+ subs:
~ Snowdrop E10
It was you again. | Because of you... | my cover’s been blown.
I thought this sub (the back half, specifically) was spot-on without being a literal translation, since this is how we would express it in native English. I’m not sure if that’s ‘creative’ per se, but I think the departure from the literal was the right call in this case. Nicely handled.
To give a reverse example, in the Korean subtitles for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), someone had to figure out how to sub the wizardly exclamation ‘Merlin’s beard!’ for an audience that might not be familiar with Arthurian myth–and therefore not know that Merlin was a wizard or why they should care about his facial hair.
They handled it as follows:
Dialogue: “Merlin’s beard!”
Korean sub: 마법사 맙소사!
Pronounced: Mabeopsa mapsosa!
Meaning: (wizard/sorcerer + non-verbal exclamation)
The exclamation ‘mapsosa!’ can mean anything from ‘oh no!’ to ‘good gracious!’ to ‘oh god!’ and the alliteration in combination with the word for ‘wizard’ makes it doubly witty. Sheer genius.
Concluding Thoughts
I know if you read one of our Episode Breakdowns, it’s easy to think that we have no use for subtitles, or just enjoy splitting hairs (we do enjoy splitting hairs–but only when there’s a point). This site basically came about because we regonise that, often, a lot gets lost and we wanted to try and help bridge that gap on what (we feel) are well made shows where, for one reason or another, the gap is almost hopelessly wide–at least to be handled within the realm of subtitles. That said, I have tremendous respect for people who do this kind of translation and do it well because, as this post hopefully illustrated, it’s not easy. I am not a subtitler. I’m too in love with the nuances of language to make my peace with cutting it up and paring it down in this way. But it undoubtedly serves a purpose, and I’m all for anything that helps bring people and cultures closer together.