Cinema-goers in China left theaters feeling disgruntled after Tuesday’s opening of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, complaining that the translation in the Chinese subtitles wasn’t quite up to snuff.
Viewers said that some of the translations in Age of Ultron were far too literal, and audiences let out a collective cringe as the heroes’ quips and lines of badassery were turned into…well, something else.
Hollywood Reporter explains:
At one point, Captain America says in the film, “I’m home,” which was translated as “I’m good,” Chinese [netizens] have pointed out. At another point, a line about having to wait too long becomes “I am very old” in Chinese.
[…] when Captain America gives some advice by saying “You get hurt, hurt ’em back. You get killed… walk it off,” it comes across in Chinese as “Run fast if someone tries to kill you.”
In another scene, Iron Man tries to rally the troops to fight to the death with the line “We may not make it out of this,” but for some reason this is translated in Chinese as “Let’s back off now.”
According to a movie-goer who posted to Weibo, the line “son of a bitch” was translated to “my old familiar friend”, “I had a dream” (about Black Widow’s dream the night before) was translated as Martin Luther King Jr’s dream would be, and “go be a hero” turned into “you are my hero”.
Irritated web users took to forums to point fingers at Liu Dayong, the main translator for the Chinese subtitles. Wang Jinxi, who was responsible for the translation quality of the movie, defended Liu and his team, saying that they had to go through 20,000 words in less than 10 days and the total cost was less than 2,000 yuan. Liu himself has also been recovering from a surgery.
This isn’t the first time a Marvel film has been criticized for its befuddling Chinese translations. Last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy, subtitled by Liu’s student Jia Xiuyan, was filled with errors. The title itself had been translated to “Interplanetary Unusual Attacking Team”…unusual indeed.
Chinese theaters have already begun correcting the translations, and it doesn’t seem that the confusion has stopped people from pouring into cinemas across China to view the flick. The movie pulled in a record-breaking 33.9 million USD on its opening day, making this the country’s biggest weekday opening of all time.
[Image Via DenofGeek]
By Sharon Choi
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