Fubtitling of Kaminey
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Yesterday while flipping channels my attention was drawn to a movie being shown on star movies. I don’t know what movie was it and I didn’t even watch it for more than 10 minutes. What caught my attention was the subtitles being displayed. Somehow I felt that the subtitles weren’t doing justice to the actual scene. In movies it’s not just the literal meaning of what is being said. There’s so much character, timing involved. For example, I still remember the scene from Parinda where first, Anna(Nana Patekar), very sympathetically, sends Jakie Shroff to convince Anil Kapoor, then once Jakie leaves, Anna tells another of his men “agar bhai bhai ka pyar beech me aaye to dono ko mar do”. This last dialogue is delivered in such a nonchalant yet chilling manner. This scene once again establishes the fact that how ruthless the character of Anna can be. I don’t think subtitles can ever do justice to this ’scene’.
This brings me to my latest favorite , Kaminey. I wonder how subtitling can be done for a movie like Kaminey where much of the fun, impact comes from the speech defect of the two primary characters. Take for instance the scene where Charlie says “teen faal fe fakal bhi nahi dekhi ufki maine”. Now, when subtitled this would become “I haven’t even seen his face for three years”. No doubt, we get the meaning of what he said, but isn’t the character of Charlie lost completely. Or to carry Charlie’s character who pronounces the ’sa’ sound as ‘fa’, should it be subtitled “I haven’t even feen hif fafe for three yearf” ? Isn’t that cryptic for someone who is relying on the subtitles to understand what is going on?
Take the scene where Charlie says “mai fa ko fa bolta hoon” to which bhope retorts “fa ko fa nahi bolega to kya la bolega!!”. Now I just can’t imagine how this scene can be subtitled. Ditto for the scene where Guddu is made to sing during interrogation so that he doesn’t stammer.
I watched the english version of QGM. In that the tamil dialogues were subtitled in english. I don’t understand tamil so I just went by the subtitles. “Anni” was subtitled “elder sister-in-law”, and i thought that’s what it means. However brangan in his review of QGM mentioned “anni” was riotously subtitled “elder sister-in-law”. Now does that mean the real fun was lost on me?
This brings me to the question, should subtitles only be literal translation of what is being said, or should subtitles follow the quirks of the character(s) too? If it’s the later then how? What more can subtitles bring to the table than just translation? What alternative to subtitles do we have? Dubbing? There have been many films where I have laughed at the wrong places when watching a dubbed film.
I don’t know who is responsible for subtitling or if the director has any hand in that, but I hope VB is able to bring the amount of intellectuality he has so far shown in the visual medium, also to the subtitling of Kaminey.
Tags: Kaminey, subtitles, technical
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Varma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Good Write UP. I Agree.
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takes me back to a post on the same lines: http://passionforcinema.com/translations-subtitles-and-the-loss-of-nuance/
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Talking about QGM, if you go by the comments posted in BRangan’s review, those who don’t know Tamil miss out on a lot of jokes.
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First of all an excellent observation and secondly a nice article.
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i completely agree with u . Though thr is one thing , while i was watching kaminey , the subtitles appeared only for the african dialogues and since I am unable to follow marathi or bengali , I think i lost quiet a lot of things in the movie . It would have been gud if atleast i understood wat the characters were saying….subtitles do take away the essence of the dialogues but sometimes they r essential too…
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Tripti definitely subtitles are essential…this article just came from a thought that is there any way to enhance the quality(or perhaps the approach) of subtitles
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Nice article dude, fresh air
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thanks to all who liked it…this is my first post on PFC
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Which is mre near to originality Subtitling or Dubbing?
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Which is more near to originality Subtitling or Dubbing?
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deepak…imo, dubbing if done properly can recreate the mood of a film and deliver the same impact. By properly I mean the right choice of dubbing artists, the right dialogues,lyrics, etc.. I remember P.K.Mishra and Mehboob were good lyricists for dubbed songs. Don’t hear about them much nowadays. But again, I’m not very sure if we can generalise it by saying dubbing scores over subtitles or the vice-versa.
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Sudip- Have you ever thought why indians ( or rather indian films) derive so much sick-humour out of physical deformities?
WTF is so funny about a lisp or a stuttering defect? Why can’t hindi films come up with genuinely intelligent humour? How low is the geenral IQ level of the film going audience?
Laughter that depends solely on physical abnormalities/deformities smacks of exteremely poor sensibilites,esp in the new millenium when everyone’s falling over each other to be politically correct.
Sure there’ve been classic Sitcoms like ‘Mind Your Language’ which were so politically incorrect, they could never be made today. But hey-they had genuine humour.
What say you?
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Perhaps I will reserve my comments on this for another post on the same topic since this post isn’t about that. Yes I did mention about the speech defects of the characters in Kaminey but that was only to highlight the difficulties in subtitling their dialogues.
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One my friends, who saw a subtitled version of Kaminey in the US, mailed me saying – “main ‘fa’ ko ‘fa’ bolta hoon” was subtitled as “I say ‘f’ for ’s’”
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I saw Kaminey in Doha Qatar , and somehow this part of world all HIndi movies are released with subtitles, and i must say The ST for Kaminey was pretty good.
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Subtitles for Bollywood films are embarrassingly terrible. That’s because there is a singular lack of attention to detail in our films. I have no idea why producers don’t factor in the fact that good subtitling can push a film’s profile internationally, introduce the film to new audiences.
Besides, they hardly want to invest in subtitling. If they would only pay translators well, good people would get attracted to this otherwise neglected (yet vital) job.
Having said that, Kaminey is tricky. Verrry tricky. I assume subtitling it would require more than one brain. But it can be done, if one applies oneself!
Cheers!
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Kaminey is indeed going to be tricky and that’s why I hope Vishal gets involved in the subtitling of Kaminey for the DVD release especially since he has written the original dialogues
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Hi, I happened to be from the team which fubtitled Kaminey, and like some one rightly pointed out it does take more than one mind to Subtitle a film like this.
Also the ‘f’ ko ‘f’ bolne waala part, let me tell you, the dorector has personally supervised every line which has appeared in the film and if the i say ‘f’ for ’s’ is an absolutely well thought of creative decision, taking several factors into account.
And Nosinz..Glad you like the subtitles..Thank you.
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Hi Sagarika, thanks for the info..I’m glad to know that Vishal has personally supervised the subtitles…if it is allowed for you to disclose can you let us know what is bhope’s reply to that, subtitled?
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I saw it with English Subtitles and at times the subtitling created humour of its own. For e.g, there is this line about “dono judwaa hein.. jaise Ram aur Shyam” (or something to that effect).. and the subtitles showed “They are twins, like Thomson & Thompson”. There was a wave of laughter when this line appeared on screen. There were few more titters when the subs translated Vada Paav as “burger”
I personally enjoy to read the subtitles to catch snippets like above.
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@Sudip, Shahid’s line is kept as the original, so we stick to i say ‘f’ for ‘f’. To which Bhope repiles, “If not as ‘f’, would you say it as ‘l’. If we changed the context here, the humour would’ve been lost right?
And Mr. Googly, you’ve got any suggestions for Vada-Pav? Glad you likes the humour generated from the subs though.!
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Ms. Fagarika,
None whatsoever @ suggestions.
Burger is as close as one can get in describing a Vada Pav to a non-Indian. I was not being critical of the translation, I was just pointing out one or 2 quirky instances which generated un-intentional laughs for audience who know/understand Hindi. For the non-native (languagewise) audience, the lines might look pretty harmless n plain.
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On second thoughts, the other best thing to do would be to let “Vada Paav” remain as “Vada Paav” in English. Let people go home & google to find out what it transalates to. This might add a native charm to the dialogues.
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Thanks Sagarika…I agree the humour would be lost if the context is not retained
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@sudip:
hey where did you come across the subtitles of kaminey.
did you watch some camrip p2p donwloaded version of the film.
that is illegal, mind you.
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Ashish…what makes you believe I watched a pirated version of the film?…read the post carefully…this entire post came from a thought on how difficult it could be to subtitle Kaminey
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Dear Googly ji,
I completely agree with you. It would be good fun to retain the native terms as spoken in the original, but because of certain requirements it is not possible and using a more universal term like the Burger makes the connect easy.
I think I would be laughng too on reading the mentioned sub titles. But as they say now “Entertainment ke liye kuch bhi karega!’
I must say we had a blast translating the Bengali bit too! For your reference, “Open Your mouth Ha Ha Ha!” is what Mikhai says
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About Kaminey… Was doing the Russian translation for this movie so I know exactly what you mean… Basically, I added stam-m-m-mering for Cuddu’s lines (on those letters, where a Russian speaking person may stab). Charlie was more challenging – I had to change the translation of words, finding suitable replacements for those cases when exact translation with F instead of S was uncomprehensible…
So it’s all is just a matter of creativity =)
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