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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Because when you are translating you are not really translating word for word but rather the whole message. Sometimes there are little things that if translated word for word it just wouldn’t make sense so for the sake of the whole message sounding cohesive it has to be omitted and thus it is lost in translation.
I asked my mother-in-law if she could iron my shirt for me because I had a job interview the next day.
“Of course, I will put it on top of my eye”
for example, chinese and japanese have a thing called 成語/諺語.
It is like a compressed file in their language. just 4 characters/letters, behind contain a full story. it is okay to be translated into novel, just use more words to explain the behind story/meaning out.
But it is hard to translate the full meaning in subtitle when time is limited and need to follow the scene/act
Because language is part of, and inseparable from, culture. To use an English example “It was a dark and stormy night” and “The sky was black and cloudy” are technically identical in meaning. However one of them carries a lot of attached cultural meaning and the other one doesn’t. If you had to translate “It was a dark and stormy night” and try to do so in a way that still conveyed the same cultural weight as it does in English, not just the dictionary definition of the words, could you do it? Maybe you could, but could you do it in few enough words to fit on screen as subtitles? *Good* translation tries to keep the inherent meaning including cultural connotations in the new language. A very many translations, and basically all machine translation, fails utterly at doing so.
Same words, different interpretations.
I once drunk told my girlfriend “you’ll miss me”, bad translation of “tu vas me manquer” in french.
The verb “miss” in french is used towards the person creating the missing feeling. So I meant “I’ll miss you”, but at the moment she thought I was a huge jerk.
(A better translation would be “you will be missed by me”, but I was drunk and went full litteral)
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