You need to understand both languages — Martin’s increasingly petty translation rules

That sounds obvious right? If you want to translate something, you need to understand what’s being said in the original language, then adapt it for the language you want to translate it in, making sure it still makes sense there and hopefully mean the same. More difficult then you might think. Here’s a good example, not taken from anime this time, but from the Danish version of Taskmaster, as presented by the official Taskmaster Youtube channel.

This sentence makes no sense in English. Clearly there’s some Danish expression or saying being used here that’s been translated literally. From context you can sort of guess that it’s about Julie being angry and needing to calm down, but this whole exchange made no sense in the subtitles. I don’t even know if moving from the purple to the red field means she’s getting angrier or more calm. A clear translation failure where the translator didn’t realise this was some sort of expression and therefore didn’t get the meaning across in English. Had they understood this was an expression and understood what the expression meant, they could’ve either used an English equivalent, or chosen to just get its implied meaning across. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.

That’s why just being able to recognise words and sentences is not good enough. You need to understand the source language well enough to know what’s being said, but also what is meant by what’s being said. You then need to understand the target well enough to be able to get the meaning across in a way that both makes sense in it and is reasonably faithful to the original. If you lack the former, you get this mess. If you lack the latter, you get what you see in a lot of scanlations of manga and especially Korean manhwa or Chinese manhua, where the translator recognises the expression in the original but has no clue as to the equivalent in English, so translates it literally and plops down a translation note. (Occassionally you get somebody who does think of the equivalent in English and just plops that in the translation note.)

What you see with this translation of the Danish Taskmaster in general is something that’s just functional enough to have as Youtube subtitles, but that’s it. A pity because the series itself is hilarious, with a nice group of competitors and a great Taskmaster and assistant. If you like the original, you’ll like this one as well. Having those substandard subtitles however makes it just that little bit harder to enjoy.