The subtitles I downloaded for this film had Tamara's lines in a very juvenile form of English ("I go to car" etc.) and I was wondering if it was just my subtitles or if it was because Tamara, as a Ukrainian, speaks in somewhat broken German. It threw me off at first until the revelation that she was Ukranian, and then it made a bit more sense. Still has me wondering though.
shareYes, she speaks broken german. I'm a native speaker.
shareI understand and thank you as it does help us understand. But that said, surely you'd have to agree that even the other characters translations were at times quite blunt and immature'ish'. It annoys me that I feel like we miss out on so much when subtitles are not translated as accurately as possible. I noticed the translation was done by Kimi Lum???
~ "Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties." ~ Erich Fromm
Sometimes, when characters have an accent or mumble (which seems to happen a lot) I will turn on the subtitles for an English language movie. One would think that translating English to English would be very easy, but apparently not. Sometimes the speaker is speaking rapidly and they shorten the statements so that viewers can have enough time to read them (I guess that's the reason), but often they alter the dialogue in such a way that it changes the meaning. They sometimes seem to alter it to use a more politically correct word or phrase as well. A sort of censorship by translation.
It's also possible that the sub-titles are taken from the shooting script. If an actor ad-libbed or revised a line, the sub-title wouldn't reflect the change.
shareSubtitle translations in general have helped me to understand why various translations of the bible tend to read so differently.
It's getting so bad that translators should be legally mandated to provide only word for word exact translations side by side with the original and validated scrolls that were proven to be a part of the original Hebrew and Greek scriptures.
Or they could just stop retranslating that idiotic old novel all together.
shareI'm pretty sure, since she was from the Ukraine and did not speak proper German. It is like when people try to speak English and it comes across broken. I thought they did a good job showing that through subtitles since that part of her character could have been lost in the translations. I'm sure it would be more obvious to those that speak German. Because to me besides that I wouldn't be able to tell she was Austrian.
shareSince Tamara was speaking Russian at the beginning of the movie, it should have been obvious she wasn't Austrian or German.
I'd like to know what she was saying in Russian on the phone.
Me too, I hate when they speak different languages and don't put subtitles. So if you spoke Russian you would have information that everyone else doesn't. Too many movies do this, if you aren't going to subtitle it, then don't have it. I don't care if what they say is not important, I would rather know then wonder.
shareI'm watching it right now and I noticed that too. I figured it was left that way to show she speaks a broken form, or to signify how she's lower class, because her pimp never speaks like that.
It's a director's approved Criterion release, so the director would have seen the subs.
At first I thought I had a defective DVD. The first lines in this movie don't have subtitles (when Tamara visits Alex in his apartment). Then the subtitles started in the shower. I think the director purposely left out subtitles when she spoke Russian because Alex didn't speak it, and even said to her that he'd like to get to know that side of her life (after she spoke Russian on the phone). Because Alex couldn't understand her, we couldn't. Unless of course you speak Russian....
Dude means nice guy. Dude means a regular sort of person.
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She was saying:” I love you too. I'll come to visit you guys sometime in winter. Say "hi" to ...". In another words she had a conversation with her family back in Ukraine.
At the beginning of the movie he tried to say "Hello, my russian sun." and she corrected his pronunciation.
But the most glaring omission is translation of the song that she sings to herself while waiting for him in his apartment. It's a modern russian lullaby that was used as a theme song for the daily evening kids show "Good night, little ones." Definitely shows her mood and what she feels.
Her German isn't grammatical, but it isn't as bad as the subtitles portray. But subtitles always simplify. What's missing is that everyone is speaking Austrian German, which is a dialect. So to speakers of Hochdeutsch, the standard dialect from Hannover that has become the official German, what you hear is a foreigner not quite speaking the language that's not quite German. That is subtle.
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Austrian German is a language of its own, but the differences to German are only minor. It's the kind of language you hear in Austrian television. The comparison to British and American English is correct.
However, in the movie they are speaking a very strong local dialect, that has as little to do with Austrian German as with German.
True enough, I found the accent a bit hard to understand most of the time. I also agree that they did a good job in the "broken german" way the eastern prostitutes speak and the way the subtitles translated it, though obviously if you don't understand German you kind of half to take our/the subtitles word for it. I think at one point Tamara says to the hotel desk guy "going walking" while leaving out "I" which I think was one of the attempts to show the broken german, sort of like the way Russians speaking English sometimes leave out "the", as they don't really have an equivalent word in their language.
shareI figured it was just how she spoke, because the subtitles for everyone else didn't seem broken in the slightest. It was only when she was speaking on screen that it seemed juvenile and broken like you mentioned.
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