Errors in Subtitles

 

written by 20807 Kim Eun Jae

 

 

In the 21^st century, lots of people spend their leisure time watching dramas and movies. Recently, more people are watching more content because there are more platforms than just TV. However, mistakes can be found frequently when translating domestic programs or overseas programs.

Some of these errors are not minor but a reminder of painful historical and cultural controversies. Moreover, some of these subtitle errors could lead to significant disputes between countries.

 

Major Controversies in Subtitles

The Korean TV show Bride of the Water God had the wrong French subtitle. When the main character delivered lines, the subtitles wrote “the Sea of Japan” instead of “the East Sea”. This writing is a barbecue stopper. It is because Korea and Japan have historical problems. Each nation strenuously insists that Dokdo and the East Sea are part of their territory. During the Japanese occupation, Japan possessed Korea’s territory, including Dokdo and the East Sea, by force. Therefore, Koreans are very sensitive about this wording.

In the same case, Time to Hunt was also controversial with the Sea of Japan. Accordingly, Netflix announced that they would revise German subtitles and review whether there were any errors in other subtitles.

Japan’s Netflix introduced the Korean movie Taxi Driver, which is about the Korean Gwangju Democratization Movement, as an uprising. They decided not to express this as a democratization movement.

Taiwan’s Netflix translated Korean TV show Kingdom, a zombie drama set in the Joseon Dynasty, as 李屍朝鮮. The reason why the title is so controversial is that “李屍朝鮮” sounds like an expression that calls Joseon the country where Lee Seong Gae founded it. This cannot be seen as a pun by adding 屍 which means dead body.

 

Problematic Subtitles

Grey’s Anatomy, a famous American medical drama, has Korean subtitles mistakes. For example, during seasons 8 and 9, when the characters on the show talked about twenty-four weeks of pregnancy. However, the subtitles were translated into twenty-four months of pregnancy. Also, the rules of Korean orthography were often incorrect. In addition, the names were not sorted out, and the words and honorifics were mixed up, causing confusion among viewers.

U.K. TV show Doctor Who season 6 had a gay married couple call their husbands as husband when they talk to others, but the word “husband” is translated into “friend”.

tvN’s Yoon’s Restaurant is a program that sells Korean food to foreigners. This formatting of the program caused misinterpretation problems. A foreigner described a Korean entertainer who worked as an employee as “gay”, but the caption translated it as “a handsome Korean man”.

Other foreigners said they didn’t like the pancakes. But the caption said, “This pancake is so nice”. When the news spread, viewers criticized the issue as excessive patriotism. Thus, tvN accepted the issue and edited the wrong subtitles after apologizing.

 

Where Does the Problem Come From?

In the case of Netflix, the system is to entrust the actual captioning and translation work to a professional outsourcing company and manage it internally. In the end, there is no internal review system to confirm the matter even if it is entrusted to others. In addition, even if viewers want to make suggestions to the customer center, it is very troublesome because they have to find and make suggestions one by one. Therefore, it is difficult to correct them immediately even if they are found to be frequently misinterpreted, and it takes a long time.

The reason why mistranslation often occurs relates to the principle of 16 letters. The subtitle usually disappears between two and four seconds so 16 letters are adequate to read in that time.

A professor of KyungNam University said the constraint of time and limitation of the number of the letter can influence awkward mistranslation. He also said that hate expression will be responsible to translation companies, not to an individual translator, which has to draw up guidelines.

Translator Ms. Ham said translators are consistently concerned with many issues like gender, homosexuality and many controversies. However, translators operate to cater to companies’ manuals, so it is hard to pay the responsibility to translators about mistranslations. So it is urgent to revise their company manuals for modern recognition.