Winterson.com, a recent addition to the CBL, has an awesome entry entitled “episode iii, the backstroke of the west” (the title will make sense when you read the entry). I had a really good time writing my “Closer Subtitle Surrealism” entry, and it gave me ideas for other similar subtitle-related posts. Jeremy has beaten me to one of them: hilarious English subtitles on Hollywood films. This phenomenon comes about when pirates do their own shoddy English subtitles to new releases. Here is just one example (and not the best):
Be sure to read Winterson.com’s original entry for more. He also has an older entry with funny subtitles for Fahrenheit 9/11.
You know whats ironic? That the ad lib Chinese “translation” is quite possibly superior to Lucas’ original dialogue.
June 14th, 2005 at 11:25 pmHow true. I would have enjoyed the film a lot more if that was the real dialogue.
June 15th, 2005 at 8:41 amthanks for the link!!! i’ve been blasted off the net by a massive surge in traffic- exceede my month’s bandwidth in a single day. =)
June 18th, 2005 at 7:49 pmthanks for the link! my site is down due to lots of traffic. got some emails from folks who don’t think the captions are real- i guess they’ve never bought a chinese bootleg cd before. =)
June 18th, 2005 at 7:58 pmjeremy,
At first I thought you were joking. Sorry about that, man! I meant no harm!
Looks like your hosting plan provides you very little bandwidth. I suggest you sign up for Flickr and use it for your image hosting. I’ve started doing that recently. It’ll save on bandwidth, since image files are much larger than plain text.
June 20th, 2005 at 9:35 amI would have no problem mirroring the website on my domain for you.
June 20th, 2005 at 6:14 pmHey, Jeremy, I linked to you, too. I don’t have very many readers, but then my friend Jodi at http://www.asiapages.typepad.com/ read my post about you and she linked to you, too, and she does have a lot of readers. Sorry your site is down. Will you be getting it back up anytime soon?
June 20th, 2005 at 11:01 pmi think they should add this on the dvd when it comes out as a extra because its funny as héll
August 9th, 2005 at 2:46 amSomebody do this man a favor and put up some mirrors.
October 7th, 2005 at 9:37 pmEm, I’m a Chinese and know what made the “translation” so funny — no pirate would hire a qualified translator to translate the tens of thousands of words, they just used underdeveloped machine translation software to do that in a few minutes, without editing or proofing.
October 28th, 2005 at 6:55 pm