Over the course of my stay here at my host family's house in Cuenca, Ecuador, I have watched a decent amount of movies. We usually watch them upstairs in the living room on their flat-screen TV, although I have also been to the cinema here. My host brother, Juan Pablo, likes to watch them with English audio and Spanish subtitles (captions). This coincidental choice ended up being one of the single greatest ways that I could learn Spanish. Subtitles in movies* are shorter than the actual spoken dialogues for reasons of on-screen space and the average reading speed of the audience (content being more important than form). This also has other advantages, though. I was able to watch movies, understand the ideas perfectly in English, and then subsequently understand how to convey those same ideas in Spanish in a clear and concise way. This is a very exciting way to learn a language!
On the topic of translating ideas, this really comes into play if we take a look at movie titles. Because movies permeate countries all over the globe, and because the main idea of the movie is paramount, a literal translation of the title is insufficient at times to convey the same intended meaning in another language. For this reason, titles can be quite different from one another in different languages. To give some good examples of this, Inception in Spanish is El Origen (The Origin), Source Code is 8 Minutos Antes de Morir (8 Minutes Before Dying), and Charlie St. Cloud is Siempre a Mi Lado (Always By My Side). The movie Taken actually has two names in Spanish: Venganza (Revenge) in Spain and Búsqueda Implacable (Relentless Pursuit) in Latin America. This is understandable. After all, just because they share a language doesn't mean it's the same culture, right? Words have different meanings depending on where you are country-wise, dialect-wise, and even situation-wise. It is for this reason that content translation is more important than literal word translation.
This is a screenshot from the official Spanish trailer.
The spoken dialogue is a bit longer:
- ¡Oye! ¿Qué estás haciendo? (Hey! What are you doing?)
- Sólo estaba ... [m]irando tu bote. Perdón por asustarte. (I was just ... [l]ooking at your boat. I'm sorry if I scared you.)
Sometimes movies are literal or very direct translations, like Limitless (Sin Límites), Not Since You (No Desde Ti), and P.S. I Love You (Posdata Te Amo). There's even the case of Kung Fu Panda, whose title is made entirely of import words, so it remains the same in multiple languages. Usually translators are not so lucky, though!
Why does all this matter to me? ¡Porque un día quiero ser traductor e intérprete de inglés y español! (Because one day I want to be a translator and interpreter of English and Spanish!)
*This is not to be confused with Television subtitling (a.k.a. closed captioning), where the Teletext subtitles follow the original audio verbatim.
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