The comments, however, are not translated! ■ AD: 👨‍💻 NordVPN's best deal is here: nordvpn.com/tomscott - with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Anyone else think Tom is just going for 600% watch time by encouraging everyone to watch the video in every language?

I'm an American who watches a Norwegian show which became popular in multiple countries thanks to a dedicated fanbase who translated the show themselves. I remember one case where there was a pun based joke that they knew wouldn't work in English so the subtitles said "bread based pun" "bread pun continues."

Love the part where Tom praises the Japanese VO and the actual VO has to effect giving glowing praise to himself.

My favorite example of localized puns is for a Canadian generic cheese spread. It's named "Cheese-tastic!" in English, and translated into the far superior "Fromidable!" in French.

A reminder that speaking two languages and being a translator are two different skills

As a deaf person, I want to thank the person who does the subtitles for this channel. I run my own channel and know how frustrating they are to add and how tempting it is to tick “auto captions” but know that they are so appreciated. Auto subtitles are the bane of my life and I’m sure many people don’t realise how awful they are if you can’t hear, yes the mistakes they make can be funny but not helpful when you can’t work out what it’s meant to read. I’m ‘lucky’ in that I went deaf as an adult, so know what words sound like and so can read the mistake in my head and work out from the context what it’s meant to read, though this still doesn’t work a lot of the time. Deaf people who have always been deaf, can’t even do this. Also shocking in 2023, is the number of shows that don’t have subtitles. Even more annoying when it’s on catch up and had them when shown ‘live’ on tv. Also very appreciative to the people who add subtitles in real time to live shows, a job many I bet have never given a second thought to.

Translator here, I worked with Tom on translations for a previous video. I also do voiceovers and translate subtitles. Both dubbing and subtitling is an art in itself, you have a lot of restrictions to consider in order to create a clean product.

As a Czech person, the part where the Have it! is dubbed to Hindi, it sounded like he's saying Yes, jebat! in Czech, literally meaning Yes, f* it! Made me laugh real hard

As someone with Auditory Processing Disorder, I cannot thank you and the crew enough for doing proper subtitles for all of your videos, every single time.

I have been a Turkish subtitle translator for 10 years and I don't think there's a single other source on the internet as accurate as your 8 minute video in describing this issue. You've explained the challenges of subtitle and dubbing translation perfectly. Well done Tom!

There's a French comedy film called _Bienvenue Chez Les Ch'Tis_ that features the best job of English subtitling I've ever seen/heard. To describe as succinctly as I can: several scenes in the movie turn on misunderstandings of pronunciation and accent between people from different regions of France. The subtitlers (or maybe the scriptwriter) re-scripted these scenes in English using new differently-pronounced words and speech - e.g., _chien_ versus _sien_ became _fish_ versus _office_ pronounced as "offish". They did this WHILE keeping all the jokes functionally intact AND maintaining the comic timing AND keeping the lip-syncing more or less true. Somebody really "laid out" to make that movie as funny as it could be for the broadest possible audience.

I’m a professional translator in French German and English but I must say, that pun at 4:54 in French was BRILLIANT. Well played to the French translators!

Translation is art. Apart from the usual joke and idiom being the most difficult to translate, particularly across Eastern and Western cultures, squeezing sentences into particular duration while keeping the full meaning is just insane. Props to all the translators in the world!

as a deaf person, i thank you SO much for all of your work

I understand the constraints, but i do wish we had an option to get subtitles that actually follow the dubbing because I set them to the same language as the dub. When the two don't match as i read along, it get really hard to follow both at the same time. And it's incredibly powerful to learn the language.

As someone with sensory processing issues but technically normal hearing - sometimes understanding what i'm hearing comes with a short delay, and accurate subtitles help bridge that gap so I can still keep pace with what i'm watching! If the subtitles don't match, however, it can COMPLETELY throw me off because of the conflict in information and I end up more confused than if i'd only read the subtitles or only listened to the audio. Accurate subtitles are an accessibility feature!

When Tom mentioned that there were dubs in other languages available, I switched to the French dub out of curiosity. I am currently experiencing an existential crisis. Also I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for translators who go to the effort to translate jokes effectively into other languages. That, in my opinion, must be one of the highest levels of comedic genius. And let's not forget dubbing actors who randomly just absolutely knock it out of the park. Edit: As a native English-speaking Australian, I didn't even have a clue what "have it" means until Tom explained it. Ah, the wonders of dialects.

As someone who is bilingual (Japanese and English), this was a very fun experience The interesting thing is that the Japanese subtitles is more formal then the spoken words, even though it's from the same script

At 6:56, "have it" translated to "ये बात" (ye baat) makes perfect sense. That phrase also doesn't really mean anything in Hindi either, but it is used in a similar manner as the English phrase. Great work by the translation team!

It was a hard (though fun) challenge to work on this project, but it turned out to be even more satisfying now that I can see the results and the good reception it is having. What a pleasure to be part of this. ❤

To be honest, the translation teams did a great job subtitling and dubbing Tom Scott's videos to different languages. Seriously.

There's an example in the Japanese film Battle Royale where the characters start the film using honorifics and polite language, but over the course of the film progressively get less polite the more things devolve. That's difficult to get across in the English version of the film, dubbed or subbed.

I love how Tom is one of the few rare creators to go the extra mile to prop up his production's team.

Watching it in Hindi, the dubbing and subtitling teams did such a great job here, and goes so well to prove the point about the differences because the dubbing team would use English loan words as we use in colloquial Hindi, but the subtitles generally avoid it.

It was uncanny watching it in Hindi but I think it shows how closely the dubbing artists did the work.

The japanese VA for this video did a great job capturing tom scotts emotions and inflections while talking!!

Additional note: pictographic languages often have a suggested characters-per-second guideline for subtitlers. For example, Japanese is often targeted around 6 characters per second, esp. if the line is kanji heavy. This also affects how much information the subtitler can cram into the space for the given time a line is allowed to be on screen - a point you I wish you would have also covered!

As an Argentinian I think "HAVE IT" could be translated almost literally to "TOMÁ". Wich is really similar if not the same in both literal meaning and the feeling you express when shouting it.

For a southern Slav, the Hindi synchronization of that scream is just amazing. The word "jebat" means "to f*ck" so it does kinda have the same meaning as curse words can mean anything really and I loved it. Thanks, Hindi translators and voice actor, you made a Slovenian smile.

I can't wait for multiple audio tracks to be finally available at large on KZfaq. As a bilingual creator, I wish I could easily dub my own videos in French!

The best translation I've ever seen is of a single strip from the now old manga Azumanga Daioh. Japanese is like Chinese in that it has measure words. Every noun has a category that it fits into and whenever you describe the number of that noun you have to put this counting word in. It's kind of like saying "three slices cheese" or "8 sheets of paper" but for every word. The categories sometimes makes sense but sometimes don't. There's a category for long skinny things and a generic category and a bunch more. The joke is that a character called Osaka is wondering why the counting word for panties and shotguns is the same. The way this was translated into English is that she's wondering why we say "a pair of panties" when it's just one but not "a pair of shotguns" because it's also one thing with two holes.

Your bit about the translators handling jokes reminds me of a children's cartoon named Miraculous Ladybug or Miraculous. The series was jointly created between a French and Korean company, with plans for release in both places plus English speaking areas with more on the horizon if they did it well. They gave the male lead the character trait of loving to make puns. knowing that they had to translate it all into at LEAST three languages it was a bold move on their part

Australia’s SBS TV network is proud of its subtitling quality, that always translated jokes and idioms from other languages into new compatible phrases from English. They gave every employee from every department a complete introduction to this in the induction training.

A great example of multi lingual translation is the Asterix comics series which makes heavy use of puns and double meanings. It's a testament to the translators skill that they remain popular all around the world, rather than only in french speaking countries.

Props to all dubbing teams shown in the rollercoaster video, they all sounded like something someone would shout in that moment.

Wow! Even for _translators_ we are a menace! Having to do lip/beaksyncing on a goose? Hats off to both goose and translator!

There's also times when English subtitles for an English show don't match what the characters actually say. Presumably in those cases the subtitle makers took the script and used that to make the subtitles, while the actors changed the lines slightly in different takes.

Biggest issue I have with subtitles, in English, today, is that many services censor them. So, the audio will have an actor swear, and the subtitles will censor it out. I can't think of any justification for that. It is infantilising to those of us with hearing issues but can somewhat hear and use to subtitles for clarity. There's also some subtitles where the editing has, as you say, summarised what was said. From an accessibility POV, that is irritating. I'm glad that practice is slowly dying out. If they really want to do that, have a second subtitle track.

Getting the spirit of a translation across reminded me of Jay Foreman's "What's wrong with London's boroughs?", where the subtitles in Esperanto for the logos song was made so that they still rhymed e.g: "eight blobs no one understands" rhymes with "oh it's hands!", and was changed to "ok glutoj strangaj aǔ nanoj" (eight odd swallows or dwarfs) to rhyme with with "oh, ok manoj!" (oh, eight hands!)

I'm from Colombia and I was today years old when I learned Tom Scott had Latam Spanish dubbing! I'm also a translator and I wouldn't have gone with "¡A huevo!", as it is too Mexican, but it's not a bad localization. On the other hand, "cuak-si gratis" was genius! xD

i never knew there was a dubbing option for YT and i see why now, looking at the credits it takes 1 person to translate subtitles but a team of 3 or 4 to do an accurate dub. I wonder how much Tom spent on this video for 6 languages

I have once read a compilation of stories made by Polish S-F writer Stanisław Lem, and one of the chapters was in fact an interview with English translator of this book. He pointed out many problems with translating puns and word-plays. For example, one of the knights had a battle cry "AWRUK", which when read in reverse, has a very obvious meaning in Polish. Most on the translators left it as-is, the German one went with "AWRUCK". Only the English translator understood the reference and translated the word as "TIKUF".

My guess is that the translators loved working with Tom on this one, especially with the helpful notes.

As someone who works as a sound engineer in the french canadian dubbing industry, I love this video so much. It summarizes what I do each day.

Props to the dubbing and subtitling teams, y’all do a kickass job!!

The beauty of different languages never cease to surprise me. I just like how subtitles alone are already a very fascinating topic to talk about.

I liked a lot the translations and dubbing to Spanish, specially on the geese part, but since it was the most spoken language out of the ones used in the video you can imagine it wasn't very close to standard Spanish. It was too Mexican, usually Latin American dub is done in an in-between Colombian-Mexican accent and vocabulary since those are the most understandable accents aside from Castilian (European), which is much more different. In Spanish in particular there's usually a country specific sub and 2 or 3 dubs (Mexican-Colombian for general Hispanic -America, Castilian for Spain and sometimes Rioplatense for Argentina and Uruguay), so we are very used to very different translations, also the accent of the dubber can be used to convey things (like it could be a Northern Vs Southern in England or a Southern/Midwestern Vs Northeastern/Californian in the US)

Being Dutch, I am not used to dubbing, except for children's programs in the age when I couldn't read. I missed all of these complications until this video. Thanks, Tom!

I do find it really cool when translation teams find new puns to fit ones that don't make sense in the translation. Another cool example is the Harry potter translation where "Tom Marvolo Riddle", an anagram of "I am Lord Voldemort" had to make sense in every language Harry potter was translated to, which is a lot.

One note from a subtitler! I suppose the "put every word on screen" approach is indeed often used in some Internet videos, but it is definitely not the modern standard for movies, streaming services etc. Style guides usually include highest reading speeds allowed expressed as a number of characters a viewer is expected to be able to read per second. The limits are indeed higher than they used to be in the past (typically around 17 characters per second, in the past more like 10-15 cps, depending on the country), but condensing text is still a crucial element of good translation for subtitles. After all, creators want viewers to be immersed in the story, not pausing constantly to read and figure out what's happening. And even if pausing wouldn't be necessary, we subtitlers want to give the viewers time to actually watch the movie, not just read the text at the bottom of the screen! When you're focused on the subtitles, you're not taking in as much of the rest of the screen as you would otherwise. Of course, it's more important when things are happening on screen, and less so when it's just a person sitting and talking, like often on KZfaq. Anyway, with good subtitles, you stop noticing them after a while, and that won't be the case if you're struggling to keep up.

जिसने भी हिंदी में डबिंग की, उसको सलाम! बहुत बढ़िया काम किया आपने। सच में Tom का पूरा अंदाज को बेहतरीन तरीके से दोहराया गया।

Interestingly, the spanish dubbing and subtitles address the viewer in different ways. The dubbing uses verb forms that are very common in Latin America (and only used in very formal situations in Spain) and the subtitles use verb forms mostly used in Spain and only very little in Latin America.

I had to translate a poem my grandma made from Dutch to English for my Aunt's wedding. That experience made me appreciate professional translators and subtitlers so much

I am an interpreter and a translator, and it’s soo comforting to see and hear from Tom that we humans are still unbeatable! :) agree on that! Now imagine, I mostly do simultaneous interpretation and often have to translate puns, jokes, metaphors on the spot… human brain is and will hopefully long enough stay the best and most flexible tool because of it’s complexity, agility, “built-in” cultural expertise, and oftentimes it’s unpredictability… we still don’t quite know how it works and it’s ok that way😄

Thank you so much for making this video, Tom! It's so cool and fun to hear about our field of work from you in such detail!

Your dubbing and subtitling teams are insane, you gotta love them doing a very good job!

I had a subtitling class in undergrad and it was SO interesting but it really highlighted the difficulty of the exercise. Translating English dialogue to French subtitles has an extra difficulty: French takes more space than English. Our words are longer, our sentence structures require more words, and when your professor insists on limiting you to 2 lines of 35 characters every 6 seconds... you have to make cuts!! Subtitling is an art in and of itself.

Just realizing that you have teams of people to translate youtube videos makes me recognize the scale in which you work. its honestly amazing

I knew translation was hard work but holy crap. Big congrats to the translation teams on literally everything, the nuance is crazy to get across. I have even more respect for them now! This video is such a fun way to explain how this works

as someone who wants to go into a career in translation and watched this video with Japanese dubbing and both Japanese and English subs for comparison, it both feels incredibly validating to have a larger KZfaqr who is a known language nerd to highlight and empathize with the human art of navigating these restrictions, and was also incredibly enlightening on certain techniques i'd never put much consideration into before myself. when it comes to larger projects that reach larger audiences, i have seen case after case of certain types of language learners or fans over protective of their favorite series (although this might be specific to my interest in Japanese culture, as video game and anime fans tend to be more self-centered, haha) bringing up how certain translated or localized lines aren't one-to-one recreations of their original versions, which is exactly the largest issue translators face. i know from my own experiences that coming up with a great translation for a line that carries meaning, nuance, and naturalness is half the battle, as if it doesn't fit in a subtitle slot or a speech bubble, it needs to be tweaked and rearranged. i have had to cut small quips in some places, which fills me with a desire to add jokes elsewhere that specifically utilize the English language, but then that leaves me conflicted over how much i feel like i'm "putting words into someone's mouth" in a sense. essentially, the main point i hope a lot of people take away from this video is that every subtitle you read or every line of dubbing you hear--sometimes even the simplest, shortest lines--has had probably way more thought and time put into it than you'd expect!

As an English speaker, I never knew that you had a team of people dubbing your videos into other languages. So cool, and it goes to show how much effort is put into these videos behind the scenes!

Japanese Tom Scott is not something I expected to hear today

And then you have dubs like Ghost Stories that just throw it all out the window and still hit a home run.

5:38 "all of which comes together for this example"..... cuts to a chick-fil-a commercial... Well that's a hell of a plot twist.

This video taught me that dubbing KZfaq videos with separate audio tracks is actually possible, I have never seen this before. How long has this feature even existed?

Props to the Portuguese subtitles team, that joke translation was brilliant

Thanks for making a video on this topic. It's really neat that the AppleTV+ original shows usually have both a normal subtitle track and a separate closed caption subtitle track (where the subs match the audio) for all the dubbed languages. It's one of the few platforms that take this extra step. Shame you couldn't provide multiple subtitle tracks for all your dubs.

A dublagem está ótima, eu acompanho o canal tem uns 2 anos, é já ajuda muito na compressão do vídeo as legendas serem feitas totalmente pelo criador do vídeo, do que as legendas criada automaticamente pelo KZfaq, espero que mais brasileiros conheça seu canal. Você produz vídeos ótimos, espero que você continue trazendo esse conteúdo diversificado. Boa sorte

As an ESL teacher, I'm looking forward to using this video, not to belittle not knowing another language, but to encourage pople on learning a second one, in as far as to not miss anything in translation. As a native portuguese speaker, I'm about to have a lot of fun turning on the portuguese subtitles when watching your vids from now on.

This is the most mind-blowing explaining of the subject on KZfaq.

06:47 feels almost like an anime

I never realized Tom had multiple audio language tracks, AND subtitles. Bravo.

My father in law used to work at the an international office where everyone speaks various different languages and come from several different countries one day a bunch of them all brought in their Asterix and Obelix books and compared the different translations from the original French. They found it really interesting to see the different styles of translation the different countries had gone for; some had done very literal translations, the German version seemed to have had all the jokes removed, and others had done their own thing with the jokes adapting them for the culture. The really fun thing is the pun based names of the characters lots of which have to be changed to make any sense (eg. The magic potion dispensing village druid is called Panoramix in the original French but Getafix in the English)

Ive genuinely hoped for a feature like this to exist on youtube for a while now, im amazed

Proud of my high school Spanish skills today! Yo se poné los subtítulos en español. Tuve que pausar el video algunas veces para comprender el chiste de los gansitos, pero conseguí entenderlo después de un poco tiempo :) I’m happy that I caught that, and I’m extra happy that you shouted it out!

You are so brilliant. The effort that goes into making these videos is acknowledged and appreciated, Tom. Thank you for everything you do, Tom and Tom's team!

This is literally so cool being able to change the audio language! I didn't know you can do that

Don't know if this happens with other games, but Judgement, a spin-off game from the Yakuza / Like a Dragon series, has 2 subtitle options: one being a more direct and literal translation of the dialogue, with longer sentences and cultural contexts mostly intact; another option matches one to one woth the dubbing script which is obviously different. This is a very interesting take on translation as the second option allows players to play the game dubbed without the differing subtitles distracting them.

AQUÍ JESSE!!! UN PLACER SER TU VOZ PARA LATINOAMÉRICA!!! 🎉🎉🎉

As a french canadian speaking good spanish i had alot of fun watching this video many time with different mixt of audio-subtitlte. good job!!

The more languages you speak, the more fascinating this video is. Props to the Spanish translator on the goslings joke, their version made me laugh a second time!

Watching this video in a different language, it's also impressive how the voice acting script not only tries to match the lip-sync as close as possible, but also tries to enunciate words in such a way that Tom's hand movements make sense.

as someone who works in localization industry, thank you for this video. It was very interesting and also to hear the different translations and VO. I can't believe I was able to watch this for free.

Never in my life I would've thought about Tom Scott saying "A HUEVO" but I'm happy it happened.

This made me think back to the dubbed Japanese movies we got in the 70s and 80s, where there would often be several seconds of dialog which would be dubbed to 'Yes' or similar. They didn't even slightly bother to match the mouth movements or overall dialog. It usually ended up being quite funny and because a 'bit' for comedy shows to mock.

I've done a fair bit of Japanese to English translation, for both subtitles as well as written media. Something I've noticed is there are a LOT of people (both translators and readers/watchers/consumers) who get so angry and heated over what the "best" way to translate is, be it literal meaning, or the essence of it. If you're translating a book, it's probably much easier to put in a note about the original meaning of a pun, compared to if you're translating a fast-paced reality tv show and need the subtitles to be comprehensible. It also depends on the audience. I know a lot of fan translations and official licensed translations of Japanese-to-English media differ a lot not only in what's official or licensed, but the actual target audience's understanding and expectations. I think fan translations tend to expect the reader to be more engaged in Japanese culture, thus being familiar with things like honorifics, politeness levels, or cultural references, so those get left untranslated. Whereas a lot of books I've bought from a brick and mortar book store have an entire glossary with terminology. You couldn't do that in a tv show though. Some other books or media just tend to drop cultural and linguistic things that are hard for someone with no exposure to that culture and language to understand all together, like an obscure cultural reference. I think knowing your audience and intent, as well as your medium, is so important for translation.

When you said your video is in multiple languages I had to try, and holy moly the french guy has a lot of energi 😆

In Latin American Spanish, the dubbed version is "¿Alguien quiere comprar gansitos? Son 'cuasi' gratis." 'Cuasi' is a play on the sound ducks make (cua cua) and "almost" (casi). So the joke is "Does anyone want some ducks? They're almost free." Good job, Spanish dub team!

It's impressive and/or disappointing that Tom's videos do all this effort to make videos accessible, though when you *pay* for a movie on KZfaq, it'll often have no subtitles, or only the translated subtitles in the language of the country you got the movie from. So thank you Scott, for doing that effort

I appreciate any creator who spends the time and money on having Subtitles, and I love when I get the chance to choose between Subtitles and Closed Captions for non-english videos.

Well done, Tom. You made me go and rewatch the whole video on more languages than I can understand.

One of my favorite examples of "Passing meaning" in a translation happens in My Hero Academia. In japanese Deku can mean either "Wise" or "Nothing". Bakugo uses it to mean Nothing when talking to Deku. Ochoco when she first hears the name takes it to mean Wise. This does not land well in English. So the chose to reference the "The Great Deku Tree" from Zelda in the dub instead

I've always appreciated when I've come across shows that have separate subtitle tracks. It was so nice to see "subtitles" and "captioning for English dubs" as separate choices.

All of the point tom brought in this video literally taught to me in many of my translation classes. Glad that he covered this topic!

I worked as a subtitle editor and the industry standard is still to capture the meaning while making the reading speed accessible. There's a limit on the amount of words per frame/second. We definitely don't put every word in, it's far more common to take out unnecessary words such as 'like', 'really' etc. And when I use subtitles now, which is quite often, I definitely see subtitles following the rules and constraints that I was taught. In the TV and film industry, anyway.

My family is Polish, I have always been bilingual. I have always said that translation is far more of an art than a science. You can give two teams of translators the exact same piece to translate, and any time that it calls for some interpretation, there is a solid chance that you will have different translation that will often capture the meaning or idea of what's being said, but very possibly in very different ways. If you only speak one language and don't look into linguistics, it is hard to get you to question and understand concepts that you need in order to understand just how tricky translating even seemingly simple sentences or phrases can be.

The flip side of this is audio description. I have enough vision to watch stuff if its close enough, but ive tried audio description a few times and it always impresses me. The narrator has to figure out what's relevant in the scene and describe it succinctly in between dialog. It does lead to some interesting moments where you hear what will happen before it actually happens though.

Ok, this has answered a bugbear I've had about subtitles for years!! I comfort watch reruns of Friends, Father Ted and other older shows, and often pop the subtitles on when I'm eating so I can still 'hear' over the crunching 😅 but when the subtitles were 'wrong', I just assumed it was due to something like the subtitlers working off the original script and not adjusting for small changes actors made t dialogue, or something. It never occurred to me that it would be deliberate to avoid slow readers missing out!!

I didn't even know there were different audio tracks (dubbing) on youtube. You just blew my mind.