(Actual dialogue: "I am married, madam".)
As a lover of good cultural products and a stickler for accuracy, horrible translations of books, TV shows, film, and animation are as much of an abomination to me as criminals, politicians and general assholes that reside in this world.
The purpose of translating is not merely to make sense of gobbledygook into understandable language. One must also translate the right tone of the dialogue, manners of speech, appropriate vocabulary, and personality. In short, translation is about delivering both the language and the
spirit of a certain content.
For once, in my life, I am watching K-dramas that ISN'T offered in front of my eyes at the TV, and I am enjoying a GOOD one, with charming characters, good story, jazzy music, great dialogue, and just the right balance of romance, drama, comedy, and tragedy.
And then horrible English subtitles just had to make me cringe night after night.
What's the deal with English subs? You ask. I'm Korean, and I don't need to read the subtitles to understand what is going on, I can just ignore it, right?
WRONG.
I cannot ignore it, it's right at the bottom of the screen, staring at me with its evil eyes, taunting me as I gasp in horror looking at incorrect vocabulary, horrible grammar, mangled names and inconsistencies.
(Our secret resistance group is so ballin', we even have a Prime Minister! Did I mention that we also have a Queen and a Parliament? We also have tea time every afternoon!)
I refuse to believe that the subbers for this particular drama are actual Koreans. (If it was, I will WEEP for the intelligence level of our average citizens.) Like the one above, where the subber has translated "leader" (수장) into "Prime Minister" (수상) just because the two words sound kinda similar in Korean, and didn't even bother to consider the context of the whole situation. Hell, they don't consider context most of the time, it seems.
(But, but, we just got into an agreement. In about five minutes. RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES. Didn't you even just tell us how quickly we reached an agreement?)
Imagine if other people, who are not Korean, wanted to watch this series. The subtitles are the only way to understand what is going on, but if the subtitles are inconsistent and confuzzling, do you think they will stay and keep watching the series? Do you think they'd care about the good quality of the show? Thus, a good show with a reflection to the 1930s will be audience-less by the barriers of language. And the spirit, the
spirit of the show... is lost; lost and tattered to pieces.
(Actual dialogue: Why do I keep getting the feeling that you are on our side?)
(Because subbers can't see the unresolved sexual tension from a mile away.)
I would have liked to provide more screenshots of worse translations for more lulz, but unfortunately they're lengthy dialogues that would require more than three screenshots at at time, and it is late at night.
Please, future subbers, please. If you harbor ambitions to translate a foreign work in the near future, please have an encyclopedia and a dictionary by your side before you do anything dangerous. Or better yet, don't even try if all you are going to do is mistranslate every ten minutes of an episode! There is a time and place for everything, and clearly, your subtitles and this drama were not meant to be in the first place!
Now, I am not personally insulting the subbers themselves. I'm sure they just wanted to share their work with everybody on the Internet. However, their efforts have been misplaced, and they should have known better than to tackle a K-drama when they can't even get half the dialogues right.
In short: Your subtitles suck. There's really no way to put this nicely, and I'm sorry if I'm being honest and bothered about it!
Eight more episodes to go.
(Screenshots from mysoju.com)
