Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Just a quick post so Mom won't have to see Godzilla anymore...

Helen Mirren as the Queen

Caption confusion mangles The Queen
By Nick Squires in Sydney
Last Updated: 11:01am GMT 26/02/2008

An Australian showing of the award-winning film The Queen was unwittingly turned into a farce by woefully poor subtitles.

The captions were included because the film was being shown to an audience of the deaf and hard of hearing by a council in Sydney.

But the movie, starring Helen Mirren as the Queen, became a comedy of errors thanks to the oddly rendered captions.

“Buckingham Palace” appeared on screen as “Burking in Paris” while the question “did you vote?” flashed up as “dead in a boat”.

When a character spoke about former prime minister Tony Blair being “educated at Fettes", it appeared on screen as “educated the fattest".

The observation that “every newspaper proprietor has blood on his hands today” became “every newspaper proprietor has blown in his hands today".

The film chronicles the royal family’s struggle to meet public expectations in reacting to the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris in 1997.

The outdoor screening of the film at the weekend was an embarrassment for Ryde Council.

The council’s Derek McCarthy conceded that the captions, produced either by a crude computer translation programme or somebody with only the faintest grasp of English, were bizarre.

“The copy shown did have some spelling mistakes and interpretations of the script which affected the experience for the deaf community present,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Originally posted by The Telegraph.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you. My faith in you as an anglophile is restored.