User talk:W.carter

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Bäckadräkten translation

Thank you for participating in the discussion on the Bäckadräkten talk page. I want to let you know that another editor has nominated the article for Translation of the Week. If successful, this nomination will lead to the article's translation into several languages. You can vote on that nomination here: meta:Translation of the week/Translation candidates#en:Bäckadräkten. I hope you do! Dugan Murphy (talk) 11:04, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome!

... for thanking me for putting your Swedish translation into the subtitles for the cerulean sweater speech. I hope you've had the chance to watch how they actually work ... I imagine you have, and you're OK with it, or you would have said something. Or just edited the timing.

Interesting what you said about the Swedish, at its most natural, leaving some words implied or unspoken that the English uses. The Polish text I put in is also more of an exact translation, but when I put up a Polish version of the English Wikiquote page, it got tagged (as you can see) as needing to read more like the Polish version of the movie, so instead of being depressed about it I rented the movie on Apple TV, where you can set up the Polish subtitles, and rewrote almost every speech that's presently on there (including the sweater speech) per those subtitles. I saw that Polish, too, drops some of the detail in the original (although less in the sweater speech, where I think it's more important).

I can see why in some instances ... in that speech from the beginning where Miranda tells Emily all the things she wants communicated to whom (which, the more you watch it, the more impressed you are with Meryl Streep even knowing what she can already do, for memorizing all that detail and doing it all in a single take, probably more than once), it probably wouldn't help a Polish audience to know that her children go to Dalton, as without having spent time living in upper-crusty Manhattan with the acquaintance of people with school-age children you wouldn't appreciate the significance of that (hell, most Americans outside the New York metro area wouldn't).

So I can understand well now why you dropped that "tragic" and even the name Casual Corner (although for some reason the Polish keeps it). I suppose what Miranda might mean by calling it that is that the chain had gone under the year before the movie was released . Which makes it even harder to justify keeping it in subtitles 20 years later ...

(Likewise, in that scene where Miranda, without makeup on, tells Andrea that she's getting divorced, I have decided I could drop "You're fetching, so go fetch" ... it's unnecessary to the speech she's giving, and really only seems to be there for its wordplay value.

Of course, following the commercial version of the subtitles for, at least, Wikiquote, raises some concerns for me regarding the free-content aspect. Since a translation has a second copyright as a derivative work, as long as the original is itself copyrighted, shouldn't we prefer our own translations over commercial ones that are inherently fair use? I can understand a bit in cases of works whose primary medium is textual, like literature, as there may be an established translation that is for all intents and purposes the work for readers in the target language (like, Gregory Rabassa's English rendition of One Hundred Years of Solitude feels pretty much like the original work to me (and, I know, a lot of other native-English readers), even though I know it isn't). But when the work is best known in a non-textual form, like movie dialogue interpreted through subtitles whose author is often not known, do we need to be as deferential?

Just some things that occurred to me early on another wikijourney ... Daniel Case (talk) 02:37, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]