Bartho Kriek

Bartho Kriek is not only a subtitler but also a respected Dutch literary translator whose credits cover the whole range of modern American literature, from William Faulkner to Paul Auster. He's recently published his first poetry collection.

Writing subtitles for foreign-language films and TV shows is an odd example of an activity that grows in inverse proportion to the global importance of a language. In the Netherlands, where a large proportion of what's shown on TV and in cinemas is foreign made, it was good for around 700 full-time jobs at the time Kriek was writing. But you only have to watch a few hours of Dutch TV for it to become obvious that subtitlers must work under high production pressure (and thus, probably, for low pay) and don't have time to check their work properly, or to research topics they don't already know the vocabulary for.

The subtitles of popular TV shows have a fair claim to be among the most widely-read texts in the Dutch language. But the whole point of subtitles is that we shouldn't even notice that we've been reading them, if the subtitler has done a good job. If they contain obvious errors or out-of-context phrases — like the 19th century sea-captain in The Onedin Line who was famously made to say "I'll phone you" instead of "I'll call on you" in the Dutch subtitles — they interrupt our enjoyment of the show and call attention to themselves. Kriek has been collecting this kind of error for some time (it must be over forty years since a new subtitler worked on The Onedin Line!), and he uses his little book to tabulate some of the most frequent problems of translation that happen in his field.

The most obvious and memorable — and often comical — are the terms which are misheard and mistranslated — a classic example is "M.O." (modus operandi) in police shows, which often gets heard and translated as "ammo", a word that confusingly almost makes sense in context ("He used the same ammo"). But Kriek cites lots of other examples, like "bird"/"birth", "van"/"fan", "pans"/"pants". These are the kind of things that make you wonder whether the subtitling isn't being done by a machine-translation system.

Another set of problems is with knowing when to translate a term literally and when to replace it with its counterpart in Dutch culture. When a detective says "take him to the station" it's usually a police station that's meant, but if you translate it with the Dutch word "station" then it turns into the place where the trains stop. Kriek complains about translators who turn "parole board" into the unintelligible "paroolcommissie" instead of using the rough equivalent in the Dutch justice system, "reclassering".

Everyday British and American idioms lead to a surprising number of mistakes, even though they are something that any translator ought to be familiar with.

I think my favourite example from the book was the line "After all he put you through..." — the subtitler somehow saw a comma where there wasn't one, and turned it into a story about a switchboard operator.

What Kriek gets most worked up about, though, is the tendency for the English syntax of the original to drift into the translation, and lead the subtitler away from the obvious, natural Dutch phrase a real person would use in this context to an artificial construction that might or might not be grammatically correct, but certainly isn't easy for the viewer to understand.

An interesting and often very funny look into the nuts and bolts of a process that we don't usually get to hear much about. Kriek writes intelligently and wittily, and clearly knows what he's talking about. It's just a pity that the book itself is a self-published typographic disaster area.… (more)