I just found this fantastic video from Taylor Mali to show “The the Impotence of Proofreading.”

Have a look, and a laugh, on this sleepy August Thursday.

Guy La Roche at A Fistful of Euros is a career subtitler. I have subtitled a few indie movies, but most of the subtitling work in Europe is on English-language films. As a native English speaker and translator, that leaves me out.

La Roche has a great explanation of why the subtitles on a film may not be equal to the dialogue:

First of all, people process spoken information faster than written information. Subtitles follow the pace of spoken language. The amount of text used in subtitles therefore needs to be reduced so that the reading speed matches the speed of the dialogue. The faster a character speaks, the more the translator needs to reduce his text. Most of the time it is simply impossible to do a word for word translation. You, the people who watch tv and movies, simply cannot read fast enough. It is your fault, not the subtitler’s.

But I’m a fast reader, you say.

It doesn’t matter.

According to a Belgian study years ago the average television viewer’s literacy level was estimated, if I remember correctly, to be that of a… fourteen year old!

If that Belgian study was years ago, and some teenagers prefer reading on the Internet to reading books, will subtitles have to change too?

My friends have fallen prey to an engagement epidemic. And when you’re the first to know, you want to tell everyone else you know, too.

But spreading the news that your two best buds are affianced can be tricky.

You can look up both spellings to make sure you get the mass mailing right. I was stymied, however, when it came to regular, real-time conversation.

Different on Paper, Same in Speech

If your engaged guy friend is a fiancé, and your engaged girl friend is a fiancée, wouldn’t you expect to preserve that difference when talking to people? At the very least, it would help your grandfather understand exactly what’s going on with your best friend Lindsay Lohan:

Her fiancé’s name is Sam Ronson, you say? Well isn’t that nice, dear.”

Get your grandfather an e-mail address, because without some serious pronoun work on your part, he would understand more by reading about the engagement than he would by hearing it in conversation.

While there are three acceptable American English pronunciations for these French terms, the word sounds exactly the same whether it’s fiancé or fiancée.

So How Do I Say It?

For the record, Webster’s offers a male voice intoning fee-ahn-SAY as the proper pronunciation for fiancé and fiancée. I prefer fee-AHN-say, which Bartleby also deems acceptable.

You’ll just have to use context to get the word out to your friends. That, or cue cards.

The Belletra blog has been on hiatus. I was translating a very large project that was followed immediately by a vacation and Internet fast.

Photo by Kim Baird

The project is now published, and I am returning to blogging forthwith!

Thanks for your support.