This is the space for a bunch of anecdotal events to laugh, and also to illustrate the importance of good translations.

 
1. The Movie that made “no Sense”

In Germany, as well as in Italy, there’s a children’s game called “silent mail”. The children sit in a row. The first kid invents a word and whispers it into the ear of their neighbor who does the same with the kid sitting next to them on the other side. Each kid has to repeat what they understood. The outcome is the goal of the game: a result that usually finishes in laughter.

This is exactly the process that had happened before I entered the dubbing studio in the morning to record the main character. I was greeted with the words: 

„This movie makes absolutely no sense, don’t worry.“

This may happen. Or not?

We started recording and already the first minutes revealed a completely senseless voice over.  As I’m bilingual with Italian and German, I listened to the text in Italian and realized that it was fine but had been translated into total nonsense. Idiomatic expressions had not been understood by whoever did the job before me, and everything that followed was wrong or pretty much invented.

The movie, that was certainly true, made no sense.

We were under time pressure, but the situation was so unacceptable that we decided to break up and work over the translation. 

I took the dubbing script home and sat down with it. What I saw was a movie the sense of which had gone lost. Texts of entire sections, even entire pages had been completely invented. As the sense had gone lost already in the beginning, the inventions made no sense, either.

It was a mess.

What had happened?

It was an older movie with no original text available. The original was in Italian. The movie had been translated into English, most likely by transcript, and then subtitled. The subtitles had been written down and given to the German translator. But I guess that already the English translator wasn’t fluent in Italian because the texts of the subtitles were often completely wrong als in English. The German translator then was a similar case: rudimentary knowledge of Italian, possibly acquired during some vacation, and not much knowledge of English, either. She had in fact declared to speak better Italian than English.

The result was a mess. I had to transcript the entire Italian text, meaning I had to do the job all over, listening to the Italian original and writing it down in German, comparing it to what was already there. It took a while. After that, the dialogue script had to be rewritten, adapted to the movements of the mouth, the time codes had to be re-established, everything had to be done from the start. The consequence was a delay of one month and doubled expenses for the German dubbing script.

Creating dubbing scripts from already translated texts is an error.