Fluent / native French speaker please! (not homework related :))

[questionzzz]

We just finished watching the film "Dans la maison" , with English subtitles and several times the phrase "normal" is spoken by the characters, in describing the main family and their house, however the subtitles translate it to "perfect", as in "perfect family", "perfect house".

My french is barely intermediate, but the family/house are a key theme and the translation is bothering me... Can "normal" spoken in French, be translated to "perfect" in this context? Shouldn't the subtitles just have read "normal family... normal house" as the characters said it?

Watching now! My French is ok but I am an experienced translator in another language... intrigued!

It's normale for subtitles to have clangers in happens a looooot.

I should watch that film. It was referenced in the song One Week by barenaked ladies. Is it on amazon prime/netflix?

Sorry, just seen you already mentioned Amazon prime. And also Canada so i presume you knew the bnl reference too

Not seen the film, but after reading the discussion the phrase 'model family' popped into my mind. Any takers?

As for producing subtitles - it's a horrible, fiddly job. I've done a couple for Russian films and both times it was a nightmare. Creating a poetic translation of a previously untranslated (as far as we could find) verse by Josef Brodsky was a memorable pain in the rear, especially when I was limited to an absolute maximum of about 58 characters on screen at any one time, in not more than two lines of not more than 29 characters (or something of that ilk).

I would translate "normal" in French as "typical". Sorry not read thread (so shoot me)

"Model family" is a clever solution.
Probably too clever for subtitles! Sadly.

it's normale for subtitles to have clangers in

On Netflix, yes, because the deadlines are tight, pay is crap and they don't always vet the subtitlers properly. Not so much with feature films.

I agree with the standard family or model family, that’s what a would translate as une famille normale. But I also agree that I’ve seen some really really port translations. We watched homeland with my cousin ( we are both french) in English author french subs and we got completely distracted by the the translations as they were so bad! But again, translating is really not as easy as you’d think, it’s not just the words you need to translate but you have to take a lot of things into context and that’s a lot harder to do than a literal translation

Excuse typos! Fecking autocorrect!!!

It's more "nuclear family" than "perfect family" really in the context, isn't it?

Burney I've seen heaps of feature films where I've blurted out "that's not what she said!" When the subtitle popped up.

Side note, amercian english subtitles on a european french film make me want to cry. They had a separate translation of Let it Go for dutch and belgian Flemish, and separate again for european and SA spanish (even though it varies by country over there) but only one English. Not so bad in that song but in a film it's annoying.

Yes, more typical, or definitely in the sense Americans use 'regular' - that is a good comparison.

Kind of 'nothing to see here'.

'He's just a regular guy...' etc.

Raspberry but as I said upthread you can convey more information in a given time frame via speech than you can via the written word so subtitlers are often required to condense and simplify information so that the average reader can read and grasp the text while still keeping up with what's going on on screen. So for example you might turn a statement like "I never said I didn't like her" into "I do like her" to make it cognitively easier to handle. That doesn't make it wrong. Of course outright mistakes do happen, but in my experience they're pretty rare: like I said, film subtitling is a highly sought after speciality and people who do it tend to be at the top of their game.

You have to fit all the information into a maximum of 32 keystrokes that have to stay on screen for 5 to 6 seconds minimum, so subtleties are going to get lost on the way in fast speech.

Yeah i get that and see it a lot but also a lot of instances where it's just a mistake, like a wrong number or yes instead of no. I wish i could think of an example. I'll post back someday when i find a good one.

In the meantime www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/film/2019/apr/25/say-what-why-film-translators-are-in-a-war-of-words-over-subtitles

Sure it happens sometimes. I saw one once where they mixed up corns on your feet with corn the plant. But it's such a tricky thing to do I tend to cut 'em some slack

Yep, Netflix has been a game changer, and not in a good way...

I once watched an episode French and Saunders with German subtitles in which they mixed up "digestive" the biscuit and "digestive" the aperitif.

The Netflix differences are likely to be because the films are dubbed into other languages, and they use the dubbed words for the subtitles. When you're dubbing, you are trying to get the words to fit in with the lip movements and timing, and you can be freer in your interpretation, e.g. changing a joke entirely because a translation just wouldn't be funny, or using a phrase that's simply more common or idiomatic in the target language. It's not really meant to be a one-to-one translation. It's only if you are then watching the original language with different subtitles that you would notice a difference.

Maybe ‘average’ as in: the norm or what is typical.
I haven’t seen the film so don’t know what they want to convey.
I remember a subtitle in an old Gérard Depardieu film which translated ‘ski de fond’ as deep snow skiing when its actually cross-country skiing. So there are errors.

I’d say perfect does work, although ideal or model is a bit more subtle.

It’s interesting because (slight spoiler alert!) to me this precise issue encapsulates some of the tension in the film - the boy clearly secretly longs for such a family (hence perfect) but at the same time he seems contemptuous of it (so one could see it as a sarcastic use of perfect). The family may seem outwardly “perfect”, but is it really, when you dig down... or is it just ordinary and just as dysfunctional as others?

It’s apparently adapted from a Spanish theatre piece- wonder what word was used in the original?

A play, you mean?

Agggh... Is that not a word in English ? Sorry, we speak another language in our family home and since I haven’t been away from my family for seven weeks I’m starting to think in that language....it seems!

Pièce de théâtre in French=a play.

I’m forever whinging about subtitles, so many just aren’t right. I always thought I should do that job.