That's a peculiarly bad translation

[mbarker]

One of the evening tv specials had a Japanese title, and an English title for that extra special touch.

The show was mostly about a 19 year old policewoman, who is working in an area with bars and whatnot, so she's seeing some of the best drunks around. Also a mother and daughter team working in a grocery store, picking up shoplifters. And a woman on the Guardian Angels Safety Patrol, working in a popular area at midnight on New Years to help keep things cool.

So the English title was "Ladies in Pandemonium." Which seemed odd to me. So I looked at the Japanese title. Shuraba no onna. Onna is the word for women. But shuraba? I had to look that one up. It's old kanji, with the meaning of fight scene, or scene of carnage? So maybe "Women in Crises" would be a better translation.

Ladies in pandemonium. That's an interesting title. But at least for me, it doesn't really summon images of a policewoman or plain clothes security folks. Or even the Guardian Angels.

Maybe I just don't understand English.

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Comments

[dialyn.livejournal.com]

I've been watching films from Korea, Japan and China. Because I don't speak Korean, Japanese, or Chinese, I have to depend on sub-titles and some of the translations are pretty interesting. I can tell by what is going on in the screen that the sub-title has problems. I've started having the sub-title turned on for English films, and then you really see how ridiculous some of the sub-titles are. In one film, extra characters found their way into the sub-titles so people were referred to that never appeared in the script. This had to do with homonyms, apparently, so when a character asked for "one," the person doing the sub-titles thought the character was looking for "Juan."

I remember when I was working on a water conservation program and we decided to have the brochure translated into Spanish. That made sense but sending our Southern California brochure to a translator in New York did not. They used a version of Spanish that made our native speakers double over with laughter so we ended up having to have our staff proof the Spanish to make sure the brochures made sense here. Had something to do with subtle differences between Puerto Rico and Mexico Spanish, as I recall (I could be wrong). Unfortunately a thousand brochures had been printed up before someone thought to check the translation.

Of course, if you want real fun, use one of the free online translators. One of our genius managers said we should just buy software to do the translations until someone with brains pointed out those translations are very poor. Maybe they have improved, but I am still suspicious of too much dependence on the all mighty computer to do something where regional nuance comes into play.

I rather like the title "Ladies in Pandemonium" but it doesn't give me an image of women patrolling the mean streets. Maybe a noisy tea party?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Right! Ladies in Pandemonium -- a mouse at the church tea party? Something like that. Although a friend pointed out that Milton apparently called the Capitol of Hell Pandemonium, which actually might make more sense out of this title. I still think most English speakers are likely to think about something relatively minor, though.

[dialyn.livejournal.com]

I have a vision of lady mice in pandemonium--perhaps a kitten or puppy disruption of a tiny tea party? It does have potential as a title...just not for the film you were watching.