Tag Archives: Subtitles

The Tragedy of Man (Deaf Crocodile)

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The Tragedy of Man (2011) is a movie that absolutely needs to be dubbed. Gorgeous animation, but the constant dialog means that my eyes are always at the bottom of the screen.

Add to that, impenetrable King James-style dialog:

Dialog is flying by while everything onscreen is moving, flashing, or doing some interesting thing. Add in this stilted olde English, and it’s impossible to keep up.

When movies were subtitled in the nitrate era, not every line got translated. I’ve seen prints where a single line covers entire scenes. We should return to that.

Then there’s the ridiculous vocabulary:

You can do pretentious writing in a spoken translation. That is, in a dub. It’s unreadable when put into subtitles.

And speaking of unreadable:

Give me a fucking break.

DUB MOVIES IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE AUDIENCE.

And an error that should’ve been caught:

Infernal Rapist (Vinegar Syndrome)

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Very nice video. No complaints.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, it’s over-subtitled and the translation is lacking.

We don’t need the entire Lord’s Prayer subtitled. It’s a pretty standard execution scene. Just this line, ending with an ellipsis, is enough.

The Spanish word for “no” is “no.” Do not subtitle cognates.

The title character’s nickname (“El Gato”) should be “The Cat” in English. (Though, in this example, the cop simply calls him, “Gato.”) We say “Mack the Knife,” not “Mack Messer.”

Coloring the subtitles pale yellow is a nice touch. I approve.

Carmen (1918, Kino)

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The Murnau Foundation put a ton of work into piecing the film back together. Then they had to go and blow two years of work by “restoring” it.

Editing errors

Carmen was reconstructed from multiple prints. Many, many gaps were filled in from lesser sources, often no more than a few frames. However, the technicians were a little sloppy, repeating frames they already had, resulting in added stutter, microloops, and reduced picture quality.

Frame number in yellow.

In this sample, the technicians appended three frames to the end of the shot. Two of the frames were already present, resulting in a microloop:

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Benny’s Bathtub (Deaf Crocodile)

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Deaf Crocodile’s BD of Benny’s Bathtub (1971) does not have a proper subtitle track, only closed captioning:

Typos:

Poor placement:

Additionally, the timing is poor. Lines appear too early, stay too long, and overlap dialog. All this makes following the movie very difficult.

The included episodes of Cirkleen suffer from the same subtitle problems.

Video quality, though, is very nice.