"remain loyal"

Film Watching as much "world cinema" as I do, I'm always very grateful for the efforts of translators in producing subtitles. Some are clearly better than others, and sometimes I can tell that my enjoyment of a film is being impacted by this extra creative voice between me and whatever the makers of the film have meant. There are some outrages. In La Haine, when Asterix is clearly being heard as a password, the subtitle says "Mickey Mouse" then mention of the diminutive Gaul is meant give a particular cultural resonance and noticing the difference pulls you out of the scene as you ponder the mismatch.

In this fascinating interview, Federico Spoletti, the founder of Sub-ti, a subtitling company that specialises in film festivals explains that subtitlers aren't simply translating transcribers. They're caught between their own "respect (for) the accuracy of their translation, the director who wants to remain loyal to the original dialogue of the film, the distributor who may want to revise the language itself and the subtitler who would like to reduce the text to ensure enough reading time on screen for the subtitles themselves" and they often have to do this within just a couple of days looking at a low quality version of the film which is difficult to see.