ferdi111 wrote:Thank you, hope subs for other episodes will follow sometimes in future?
All my translating work is done, I was just waiting for a good chance to release this with my modest bandwidth. I will be releasing
all 13 episodes with English subtitles, and for anyone who is interested I will also release the Swedish subtitles I site-ripped. Someone may want to translate into other languages, or do their own research to improve the English ones even more. I know these subtitles are not perfect, but I am mostly mostly pleased with them; I am definitely NOT a Swedish speaker, just a dedicated Lindgren fan. I was not content to leave the machine-translation as is -- I spent anywhere from 1.5 to 3 hours per episode, going through the Swedish line-by-line and sometimes word-by-word, researching various online dictionaries and investigating Swedish colloquialisms that Google has not a clue about. (I take my entertainment SERIOUSLY, man!
) Some terms I even left in Swedish because all the English options sounded bad. The literal meaning of an interjection is not particularly important, fy fabian! I wonder how translators cope with Homer Simpson saying "DOH!" all the time. I say they should leave it as is.
I made a deliberate and conscious decision to refuse all translations of character's names, because those are their NAMES. Every person's name has a "meaning" that they do not necessarily know or think about. Should we refer to Albert Einstein as "A Bright and Noble Stone" or Mao Zedong as "Feather Blessing of the East"? That's one way to translate them in English! But they are proper names and are left alone. I apply the same thinking to characters in literature -- Pippi is a REAL PERSON to me and deserves the same consideration. As for all the ssons and dotters and dottirs in Scandinavian names - those are part of their proper names, they are stuck with them.
With forms of address like "Mister," "Princess," "Ma'am" and the like, I would generally go with the English translation, but for Herr Nilsson I made an exception and left it as is. I can not justify that rationally so I won't try! I just like how it sounds.
I made substantial changes to the Pippi Theme Song from the accepted English version. Maintaining the rhymes was nearly impossible, but I worked hard to try to keep it to the original meter while maintaining the meaning. There are some songs in future episodes where I made some potentially controversial choices, so be warned.
I think it likely my attitudes are shaped by the fact that I ignored Pippi as a child. I was not interested. It was only as an adult that I discovered the Swedish language original films and fell in love with them, despite my knowing no more than a half-dozen words of Swedish. I have watched the English dubs and do not like them. The English-dubbed song is like a spike in my ear. I have read the books and like them but have no nostalgia for any translator's particular choice of words, and I know that they have to make compromises to avoid a text full of pages of footnotes and explanations. It would be ideal if I would just learn Swedish, but that is not going to happen, so attempting an accurate translation while maintaining the Swedish "flavor" has been my own modest goal. When I speak to Herr Nilsson, he won't be confused by my calling him Mister.