Lost in Translation – Malaysians, Bad Subtitles and the Government

We all suffered through old foreign movies with bad lip synching and grammatically improbable subtitles before (e.g. most of Jackie Chan’s old films, like the picture above).

Apparently, this is a universal phenomenon as Malaysians are graced with subtitles like “clothes that poke eye.” The Malaysians joke that it isn’t even “Manglish”. Sadly, as far as the Malaysians are concerned, the bad subtitles aren’t movie exclusive— they’re encroaching into real life.

Earlier this week, the Star Online reports that the Malaysian Defense Ministry’s official site was littered with horrible, garbled translations.

Prime examples were located on the site’s guidelines for “ethical clothing.” It included gems like “collared shirts and tight Malay civet berbutang three”, “long-sleeve batik shirt with collar/mongoose fight made in Malaysia” and “shine closed”.

When these mistranslations made it onto the social media circuit the Defense Ministry reacted immediately by taking down pages, posted a clarification and promised to make corrections. However, the damage was already done.

And according to Star Online, this isn’t the first time that Malaysian government eschewed the use of professional interpreters/translators either.

In April of last year, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and his entourage were greeted with a welcoming banner rife with Chinese syntax and grammatical errors. The translation read: “Official welcoming ceremony, with him Wen Jiabao His Excellency’s official visit Malaysia.”

Malaysian officials apologized to the Premier and the incident was subsequently widely reported in China.

Bad subtitles in foreign movies are hilarious, if albeit cringe worthy, but it sure doesn’t translate well in real life.

*Source – The Star Online

Exotic Cursing & The Best Cover for a Foreign Spy

Exotic Swearing

Bulletstorm was to be an over-the-top shooter game with large weapons and its arsenal of ridiculous swear words— well, less on the cursing in retrospect, creative director of the Polish development team People Can Fly Adrian Chmielarz admitted:

“Do you know any swear word in a foreign language? German, French, Polish? When you say it out loud, no biggie, right? Not a problem to use it during a family dinner, I assume?

“That is how all the f-bombs sounded to us. Being Polish, all the strong language in Bulletstorm was just exotic and fun to us. We did not feel its power. In other words, Epic thought this is what we wanted and respected our creative vision, while we had no idea this vision was a bit more than we really wanted.

“It was only at the end of the development, when I read the Polish translation of the game, that I realized how dirty we were. I swear a lot. A LOT. And yet still I ...kind of blushed.”

Playing with a foreign language’s curses may be fun and exotic, but it does not translate over well as Chmielarz learned.

*Source: Gamasutra

Best Cover for a Foreign Spy

Modern spies are seen through the Hollywood lens of James Bond or Mission Impossible— suave agents with an assortment of identities suited for any situation. Real spies are more practical in their choice of cover however— like a foreign interpreter for instance, but even that cover is not infallible. This month, Russian revealed that it arrested a Chinese man posing as an official interpreter for spying.

The Russian Federal Security Service said Tun Sheniyun was arrested in Moscow last year for allegedly trying to obtain secret documents about Russia’s missile systems.

The FSB released a succinct, short statement on the issue:

“The investigation established that the Chinese national (was) working on assignment from the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China.”

Being an interpreter provides the perfect excuse for being in a foreign country without much scrutiny. It is certainly not enough to be caught pursuing classified documents on missile systems, however.

*Source: Global Post

Chinese University Attracts Overseas Students

Programs like Rosetta Stone, online translation sites like Babel Fish and local universities can only do so much. The best way to learn a language is still to go straight to the source, which is what a lot of overseas students have done with Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) to learn Chinese for a variety of reasons.

Adam Daniel Bruer-Zehevi for example is attending the university to open a translation company next year. “I have a business plan in Beijing, and Chinese language study is my final preparation before I open my translation company next year,” he said.

Miyuki Edo, a Japanese woman, is another language student that is studying at BFSU to hone her Chinese, “More Chinese are visiting Tokyo every year, and Japanese who can speak fluent Chinese are popular in the tourism employment market.”

Edo continued that her friends joined the university to be in the city during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Bruer-Zehevi observed that he also wanted to see the “real China and its people.”

“We also enroll a lot of students from less-developed countries who have scholarships funded by the Chinese government,” said university president Chen Yulu. “In China, only BFSU has the teaching and research resources of some less commonly taught languages, so students from these countries prefer our university.”

Yulu noted that about 1,500 oversea students are studying at BFSU this year, an increase of 500 more students compared to the record set in 2008. South Korea has the most oversea students in the university followed by Japan, Malaysia and Italy.

Future plans for the university includes attracting more students from Western countries for degree studies and foreign officials for short-term programs.

“We also welcome overseas students who have learned some Chinese in our overseas Confucius Institutes and want to further their study in Beijing,” Yulu concluded.

*Source: China Daily