Sorry, everyone

Hey, entire world. I’m really sorry translations can’t be perfect.

And by that I don’t mean translators are bound to make a few mistakes, though of course that’s also true. I mean no translation will ever be exactly the same text or give you exactly the same experience as the original. Think you’ve read War and Peace? If it wasn’t in the original Russian, it wasn’t exactly the book Tolstoy wrote. Close enough to pass as the same book, of course, but not 100% the same. The best way to understand the soul of Natasha Rostova is to read it in Russian. The rest of us are settling for exported Natashas.

100% concordance between languages is not possible this side of the eschaton, but it seems some people just can’t bear reminders of that sad truth. Witness these complaints about the subtitles and dubbing for Squid Game on Netflix (although when an article says something has “sparked an online controversy” you never know how many people were actually involved…)

Movie subtitles and dubbing come with particular challenges for translators, who have to consider things like how quickly the audience can read (which means subtitles almost always say less than the dialogue) and how to avoid severe mismatches between spoken dialogue and actors’ mouths. If an American actor says “ham” it might get dubbed into German as “Salami” because fits the mouth shape better than “Schinken,” which is German for “ham.”

So there’s a lot going on, OK? As it says in the Squid Game article:

Dr Cho said there was no such thing as a perfect translation, and differences in dialogue were unsurprising because many words, phrases or concepts were “untranslatable” from one language to another.

“It’s not limited to English and Korean, but between English and Japanese, or even between Korean and Chinese,” she said.

“There are always things that can’t be translated perfectly.”

Thank you, Dr. Cho. And again, sorry everyone.