I get that ofcourse no languages will be exactly identical but as a bilingual, whenever i watch a show with my native language and the subtitles are set on to my second language, so many of the meanings get lost in translation even when the translation is pretty accurate? How could this be
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Some euphemisms do not translate well. If I said “That fellow was acting a bit spicy” that makes sense in a couple of languages but English isn’t one of them because I’m using a Kenyan euphemism. Yes, it does make sense in English to an extent, but it’s uncommon. So you might say “That guy’s a bit grumpy.” as a translation. It’s not correct, but it gets the meaning across..
If you say, in French, “Je ne comprend…” You could translate that as “I don’t get it.” or you could translate it as “What?” or you could translate it “I don’t understand.”, etc, etc.
If I say “That’s like Jay refusing a ‘J’.” and there was a previous reference to a Kevin Smith movie, people would know what that means. This assumes that you have watched Kevin Smith movies and are aware of Jay’s penchant for smoking the jazz cabbage. For safety though, you change the translation to the nation that you are translating for. There’s probably a “Jay” there but they have a different name.
If I made a movie, and I had a female character say, “Did you see my panoosh?” that would not make sense. Because the context is that it is a local slang, in Ojibwe, in northern Minnesota, for a woman’s lady parts. It is not common parlance. So you’d have to translate that into something that makes sense in the region that you are showing the movie in but you can’t use standard language, you have to use a local euphemism. Also, it has to be a local euphemism that does not match the speakers ethnicity. That takes work. It’s hard, and it will never be perfect.
Bottom line, as much as it bothers all of us, they are doing their best. You have to translate things that make no sense in the language you are translating into.
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