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Nos especializamos exclusivamente en los idiomas español e inglés. Contrario a lo que sucede en muchas compañías traductoras, contamos con personal con altos niveles académicos, lo cual les permite verificar minuciosamente cada una de las traducciones. Si desea usted tener una idea del resultado de una traducción que se realizó con poca seriedad, le interesará el artículo The Creative World of Spanish Subtitles que se encuentra al final de la página.
John J. Pint es autor de diez y seis libros en inglés y español, entre ellos, cuatro tomos del curso Encounter English (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1979); Telephone Talk (Prentice Hall International, 1983); WordPerfect Para Todos (Compart/Patria, 1990, 1993) y Outdoors in Western Mexico (Editorial Agata, 1997). También él es el traductor al inglés de la serie The Adventures of Lucky Luke (Dargaud/Prentice Hall/Phoenix ELT, 1988, 1995).
Robert Nelson es el traductor de The Teachings of Don Carlos y The Toltecs of the New Millennium, ambos escritos originalmente en español por Victor Sánchez (Bear & Co., 1995 y 1996). Con respecto al primero, Bear & Co. señala que la traducción es "de verdad excelente" y Capra Press asegura que es "una muy buena traducción."
Susana Ibarra de Pint colabora como escritora con las revistas Geomundo y México Desconocido y su experiencia como traductora incluye los manuales para el alumno en los cursos de la serie Encounter English (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1979). Actualmente se encuentra traduciendo los tomos contenidos en La Espectroscopía de Reflectancia Aplicada (Spectral International, Inc., 1996).
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I live in Mexico and often rent videos. Most of these have the original sound track in English, with Spanish subtitles. As my Spanish has been improving over the years, I've discovered that sometimes the subtitles are more entertaining than the film.
For example, here's a line from Body Chemistry II: "I dreamed I was in bed with you." That's what was spoken from the screen, but what countless Spanish speakers saw in the subtitle was "Soñé que estaba en Beverly Hills," which means "I dreamed I was in Beverly Hills." To say the least, something got lost in the translation.
Highly inventive subtitles like this one are typical of what non-English speakers occasionally encounter while viewing most of the films that come their way. But how do translators make such enormous blunders in the first place?
A glance at a few similar mistranslations may shed light on this question. In the movie Sliver, "Carly, you're wrong!" comes out "Carly, Don't run!" In Missing, "a scuba-diving course" became "a course on Cuba." and in Princes in Exile, "We started out butting heads" is turned into: "We started out with butterheads."
Now, sometimes the translator gets the English right, word for word, but can't make heads or tails out of it. The expression may be a political, historical or religious allusion or just "teen talk" and unlikely to be found in any dictionary. In the film Don Juan de Marcos, the translator misses the religious connotations in "It was like the Garden after the Fall" and turns it into "the garden after the autumn." In White Wolves, a hungry hiker opens her knapsack, digs inside and says, "Who took my Power Bars?" The translator, obviously not a big candy bar fan, valiantly tries to make sense out of this cryptic question and has the girl say, "Who took my emergency lights?" Unfortunately, those Power Bars come back into the story several times and eventually get eaten up, leaving much of the Spanish speaking world wondering when those wonderful edible flashlights will appear at the hardware stores in their country.
Of course, foreign-film dialogue is expected to sound a bit odd, but it would be nice if it had something to do with the movie.
When it comes to getting things dead wrong, though, no one could outdo the translator of a better-forgotten flop called Dead Space, in which a spaceship's robot announces "Defense shields are up!" while the subtitle reads "Defense shields are down!"
What could film producers do to ensure that their painstakingly crafted masterpieces remain somewhat intelligible to millions of moviegoers around the world? They might insist that translation agencies start practicing quality control and undergo frequent spot checks by independent sources. They might also insist that subtitle translators work in bilingual pairs, one member being, for example, a native speaker of Spanish educated abroad and the other an English speaker raised and educated in the States. My wife and I fall into these categories and we've discovered that working together really pays off. Besides, four eyes spot far more mistakes than two.
If such practices are followed, Steven Spielberg will fare better than Bill Clinton did when his reelection victory speech was broadcast all over Latin America... translated into Spanish, of course. Here's what the humorist Navarrete had to say about Clinton's speech, in the highly acclaimed newspaper Siglo 21: