Majumder echoes this, saying: “If you work against the editing of a film, it will be difficult to read the subs. Another is that there shouldn’t be more than 15 characters per second-any more than that strains readability. One is that a subtitle should never overlap with a cut. In its most basic sense, spotting is determining where a subtitle should start and where it should end in relation to the onscreen action.
#Subtitles for movies in hindi how to#
Subtitlers must know how to execute, or at least work with, what is known as “spotting". It’s important to be ruthless, she says, because otherwise you’ll end up with the most beautiful sentence, a perfect translation, but no one will be able to read it because it is too long. This has to be done, though, without losing information or the essential flavour of the scene. German words are usually longer than Hindi ones, so she often has to shorten what’s being said. Majumder says her job is to come up with subtitles you can read without losing sight of what is happening on screen. “If you translate a book," she says over Skype from Hamburg, “the German book can be longer than the English one. Sonja Majumder, who subtitles Hindi films in German, agrees with a colleague who compared subtitling to the translation of poetry, because it involves working within confines. “It’s almost impossible to pack in all the information." “Ads are incredibly challenging," he says. Durandy was worried that French audiences wouldn’t pick up that the doctor is Muslim, and the patient’s family, Sikh. In this minute-long ad celebrating Ramzan, a doctor about to break her fast is interrupted by an urgent case later, the patient’s mother invites her to a modest iftar with them in the hospital. He mentioned that he was working on a small, tricky project he’d picked up for fun: a Hindi commercial for Indian retail store Big Bazaar. We were chatting after dinner, and the conversation leaned towards films and his work. I visited Durandy last year at his home in Normandy, complete with goats, sheep, geese, a cat, and a peahen and peacock named Laxmi and Narayan. “They see what they think is the daughter sleeping in the kitchen," Durandy says, “and they start assuming things." Because of a bridge translation, he says, aap became the informal tu in French and not the formal pronoun vous, thus confusing viewers who thought, incorrectly, that the characters were mother and daughter (the actual relationship was of employer and house help). He gives another example, of an Indian short film which was shown at a major film festival. Over Skype from Normandy, France, Durandy explains that this was probably a result of “bridge translation"-not using the original language as a source (“upper-caste" was likely interpreted as “upper-class", which then became “luxury").īridge translation, in Durandy’s eyes, is a cardinal, if common, sin. The Italian subtitle reads “Hotel di lusso"-luxury hotel. The confusion may have begun with the word “hotel", retained in the English subtitle. The English translation for this was “Upper-caste Hindu Hotel – Pure Vegetarian"-a possible attempt to provide cultural context for foreign audiences (Indians would guess that it’s upper caste from the proprietor’s name and the “pure vegetarian" specification).įrançois-Xavier Durandy, a French subtitler of Hindi films, supplied a fascinating addendum, tweeting screenshots of the scene with different European language subtitles. In the first episode, there’s a restaurant signboard which reads “Satyanarayan Shukla Hindu Hotel Shudh Shakahari".
#Subtitles for movies in hindi series#
The series threw up another subtitling conundrum, one that extended beyond the original Hindi phrasing and its English translation.
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