The human translation is incomplete and misses the mark, thus leaving the viewer in the dark. The machine version is literally correct but not idiomatically. But the young woman is being asked about something from thirty-five years ago and predictably responds with the French line as shown. Here the “You’re kidding right?” is a hangover from the previous shot/subtitle and shouldn’t even be included again. Not what you want when learning a language. Therefore, the subtitle must be “She’s always absent”: the English audience would understand that it doesn’t mean just physically but more so emotionally the always would be more colloquial than “usually,” and it would be understood as “ always” but “ always.” So if someone went to a French class and used what they’d learned here and said to the teacher, “Je suis absente” to indicate they needed further help, they’d be laughed at. Had the subtitler watched the film first, they would have known that the woman has PTSD, which is unknown to her children, so her son just finds her emotionally unavailable and is very hurt and angry about that. In fact, here’s an argument for giving captioners and subtitlers reasonable work timelines instead of ridiculous demands of urgency. “Absente” and “désorientée” or “confuse” wouldn’t be synonymous here. The machine subtitle is typically autogenerated: it just translated the line literally. Here the doctor is taking a history of the woman and asking her children questions about her health and behaviour of late. A good subtitle would have replaced the machine one with something like “(sighs with stress)” or “(anxiously sighs).” This subtitle is used many times in the film, unfortunately. In this scene, the young man is upset, stressed. That’s somewhat of a grammatical nullification in English, never mind a contradiction in meaning. “Haleter” means “to pant,” “gasp,” or “puff” in French, but for the moment, let’s look at the autocraption “(Breathless breath)” which a human has not chosen to correct. But how did a machine supposedly translate “la crisse” to “the crease” if they’re using a corpus dictionary? Autocraptions 0, #NoMoreCraptions 1. “J’ai la crisse de paix” is not about “the crease of peace” or even, dictionary-wise, “the crisis of peace”: it’s swearing with “Christ” and colloquially would be used as in the human subtitled “I feel so fucking peaceful.” So, that part is good! If it were France, it would likely have been some form of “putain,” but it looks like the translator asked someone who was familiar with swearing as you’d find it in Quebec or perhaps Maritime Canada (because as we’ll see below, the rest of the translation is problematic). And by the way, I could have selected a film in any of the languages I know and found similar issues this is just an illustration. In the following examples, when all three languages are shown, the original French is on top, machine in the middle, and human on the bottom. I recommend it.) I chose to watch both the “machine” translations (as Netflix calls the autocraptions) and the “human” translations simultaneously. (I know because I went to translation school and, being in Canada, we dealt with Québécois French as much as European French.) (And sidebar, it’s a difficult film to watch but excellent. I experimented with a film and language I was familiar with: “Incendies” by director Denis Villeneuve (2010) in French-Québécois to be exact, which is no mean feat for a French-from-France-translator to tackle. Unfortunately, the two versions of subtitles are so poorly handled that there’s no way in Hades you could learn much language from them. Most useful is the ability to set the automatic pause on each text box. You can choose to see the automatic voice recognition–software’s subtitle translation or the human translation or both. There are indeed some very cool functionalities to this tool. Especially based on most of the subtitles. You’ll learn stuff, it may be fun-it may even be “cool” as the linked article says-but you won’t be able to converse in the original language of the show. But to get viewers’ hopes up by presenting this tool thus is like saying you’ll learn to be a chef by working as a cashier at McDonald’s. Now, I’m a language nerd, so I’m not knocking different modes of language acquisition or people’s desire to expand their worldview or personal skills. You may confirm what you know, learn the odd word, or see something spelled that you’d only heard before, but you aren’t going to learn a language. Spoiler alert: you aren’t going to learn a language with the “Language Learning with Netflix” browser extension. Please note I’ve used quotation marks rather than italicizing words as words (in captions/subtitles) with the aim of making a more accessible document. Read the background and objections here, then delve in to my POV.
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