
ROMA French subtitles or how to ruin a masterpiece, by Netflix - hadrien01
https://beta.ataa.fr/blog/article/roma-french-subtitles
======
theNJR
The ATAA seems mad.

"The subtitles for Mixtec dialogue appear between brackets, while those for
Spanish are in standard font. Apart from the fact that this confers a
different value on each language, it hinders readability and is a convention
never used in French subtitles. It would have been conceivable to use two
different colors, but that too would constitute a distraction from the story
itself. The most logical option would have been to trust the audience to hear
the difference and get used to it through the narration."

They did this for the English version too, and I'm glad they did it. At least
on first viewing, I doubt I would have picked up on the two dialects, and it's
important to the plot to know there is a difference.

The rest of the article doesn't give enough context to the mistranslations for
me to be outraged.

~~~
seszett
> _The rest of the article doesn 't give enough context to the mistranslations
> for me to be outraged._

Not sure about what context you might like, but from a French viewer and
reader, it is really weird at times. Language register unpredictably switches
between 19th-century formal language and modern urban youth slang, and it's
just shock full of grammatical and spelling errors. Many other lines simply
have a different meaning from the original, sometimes making no sense at all.

It happens often enough with Netflix. I think they just hire the cheapest
translators they can find, and those aren't actually fluent in either of the
two languages they have to work with.

