Multilingual Italian, English, German revision for a documentary

Working together

The director relied on a huge translation agency to have his subtitles translated but he wasn’t satisfied by the end result and wanted someone who was native Italian and could understand also the Sicilian accent, but knew English and German as well to revise the subtitles before the world premiere at an important Italian film festival. He mentioned some critical points in the texts that he guessed were misunderstood by the person who transcribed the dialogues from Italian-Sicilian in his first email. Moreover, he wanted there to be a single person managing the other languages involved to speed up working times.

Firstly I watched the documentary to get an idea what it was about and then started revising the subtitles in light of the story, comparing the different versions in different languages. As the director has already warned me, I found some inaccuracies. The Italian transcriptions weren’t correct and therefore neither were the translations of those texts.

For this assignment I didn’t need to get prepared in a specific way, because the key parts of the job were watching the documentary and analysing the texts, fine-tuning my changes along the way while revising the text.

The services Hanspeter chose

Hanspeter opted for the multilingual revision service: the revision of transcribed Italian subtitles and of the subtitles translated into English and German.
The director said he wanted there to be just one professional managing many languages at the same time for his convenience and to avoid the texts being handled by too many people.
I then discussed with him some linguistic and stylistic choices I made to explain my reasons and be sure I understood the deeper meaning of what he wanted to convey. In some parts of the text I proposed alternatives to the existing texts we had gone through together, and I also suggested an alternative title for the documentary, which the director ended up using.

Difficulties

Working with subtitles isn’t easy at all because you need to adhere to a specific text length to make sure the subtitle fits on screen and can easily be read. This means you sometimes have to choose an alternative even if it’s not the best solution, to make best use of the space available. Subtitles are not actually an exact transcription of the dialogues we listen to; they are an adaptation that keeps the same meaning of the original message.

Another challenging aspect of this assignment was understanding the strong Sicilian accent. In particular the local accent of the main characters, particular to Stromboli and the surrounding islands, is even worse. Some of them had a particular way of speaking that made it almost impossible to understand what they were saying. However, by listening to the audio plenty of times I could work out what they said and translate it into the required languages.

What the client has to say

Contact me if you have a multi-language assignment you want me to revise.

When a project has to be introduced to a wide audience who speak several languages, you need a multilingual translation. But this isn’t enough: you’ll then need a pair of fresh new eyes – two, if you wear glasses – to assure that everything works and the final result is perfect. I can lend you my fresh eyes.

Send me your request through the contact form and I’ll get back to you within 48 hours.