Getting the words in focus(3)

But accidents happen. According to the entertainment magazine FAMOUS, the subtitles for the 2011 French documentary The Extraordinary Voyage was "incomplete" when it was first screened at SIFF - several sentences read "XXX" where the interns had not been able to offer a coherent translation.

This, along with some bloopers, has brought the film festival's translators under fire. It didn't help that in Danny Boyle's debut 1994 film Shallow Grave the phrase "the bloody wardrobe" came out as "xuexing de yichu" ("the wardrobe reeking of blood"). Critics have not just attacked the translators but gone on to bash the festival itself.

On mtime.com, China's major movie website, blogger "Midnight Scream" raged: "It is extremely rare that movies shown at an international film festival are so badly subtitled. It is not the translators that should be blamed, but the people who let incompetent translators do this work."

Other bloggers went further. "It is ironic that the SIFF is a big spender at inviting A-list celebrities to their red carpets, but refuses to pay for more professional translators who would greatly enhance the overall quality of the movies they screen," a netizen called Red11 noted.

Professional aid

But things might be improving. This year, for the first time ever, the SIFF has hired a professional translation company, the China Translation & Publishing Corporation. This company will also be providing translation services for the International Horticultural Exposition 2014 in Qingdao and the Youth Olympic Games 2014 in Nanjing.

The company will be responsible for checking the translations of the students. The first 30 subtitled films were handed over on May 22 and company translators will be checking all the subtitles until the day before the festival opens.

Ju said the company would now be held responsible for any translation errors. "If audiences discover any errors in the subtitles, we won't be blaming the students. We will go straight to the company which will have to pay a fine for every error it did not correct."

Lü Jing, general manager of the China Translation & Publishing Corporation, said that his company was looking forward to providing Chinese subtitles for the SIFF in the years to come. "The importance of language services in the arts and culture is underrated. We need to work with the SIFF to improve subtitles and help the audience better understand what they are watching."

Certainly non-English-language films pose a problem. Sometimes for more obscure languages, neither the professionals nor the students understand the original dialogue and have to rely on the English subtitles. Some of the subtitling for these films has been the most criticized.

A festival audience member calling himself "zrphyrs" said Landscape in the Mist (Greece, 1988) was "poorly translated" and "definitely needed retranslation or revising." Another audience member "Rui" found watching Stars Above (Finland, 2012) "dreadfully stressful" and that "it was even harder to understand the Chinese subtitles than the English ones."

It's not that the SIFF has no access to people who can translate more obscure languages. The Shanghai International Studies University offers courses in Hebrew, Vietnamese, Arabic and Ukrainian among many other languages.

But the SIFF doesn't feel that adding extra language translators is needed at present. "We can do little about it - there are just too many minor-language films to work on in such a short time," said Ju. "We only use minor language majors to subtitle the few films that are really important, for instance, those making an international debut at the SIFF."