Extremely Lame

Would it be too much to ask for some QA on the part of Williams Street when they hire someone to do the subtitling? I realize that shows on [adult swim] may a bit cutting edge and use some language that may not be in the vernacular, but it’s just painful watching the subtitles (a habit I got into years ago) be not just wrong, but completely ignorant of some of the jokes.

I’m not expecting a word-for-word translation. So long as the message is conveyed, I don’t care too much. But when a joke or pop culture reference is completely borked, I get a bit annoyed.

Let’s just take the first episode of Venture Bros season 2. in the first couple minutes, Doctor Venture makes a Buck Rogers joke and calls his mutated twin brother Twiki. He then proceeds to imitate Twiki and says he has “beedeebeedeebeedee big contracts” and there are “beedeebeedeebeedee bills to pay.” However, the subtitles say he has “very very very big contracts” and “many many many bills to pay,” completely ruining the joke.

The rest of these all come from a single episode because I was looking for one mistake that I remembered well, and they all jumped out at me before I got to it. In the beginning of the episode, we have Phantom Limb trying to sell a stolen Rembrandt to an Italian mobster in a track suit. Phantom Limb says that his girlfriend comes “bearing wine shandies.” Wine shandies. Shandy is a combination of lemonade (or lemon lime soda) and beer. What was said (though sounding very similar) was “wine chiantis,” which makes far more sense in context. Fine, I can understand this mistake if it were the only one.

Immediately thereafter, we have the subtitler misspelling ramen noodles as “rammen noodles.” Who doesn’t know what ramen noodles are? Especially people working in animation!

Talking about The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Dr. Venture says he makes a discovery of the “non-scientific kind”, which gets subtitled as “Bond scientific kind,” Ugh. Given his job as a super scientist, that makes far more sense to refer to his actual work, creating walking eyes and death rays, not for finding a musical in the TV Guide!

Ugh, just watching the subtitles on this episode is driving me insane. Still thinking The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is a porn, he thinks he understands Brock’s hesitance to join him in watching it, saying that those kinds of films are meant to be watched “solo a mano,” making a pun of “mano a mano.” The subtitling just removes the second word, and makes it “solo, mono.” I suppose it sort of makes sense, but again, it completely misses the point.

The Monarch talks about how he met his date on LiveJournal. She describes The Monarch’s picture of his prison-sculpted abs as “foine” and that he “was teh sex, whatever that means.” The subtitling changes that to “lean” and says that he “was ‘to have sex’, whatever that means.” I’m pretty certain that an adult knows perfectly well what it means to have sex, although he may not be completely knowledgeable on leet-speak.

Talking about Phantom Limb to his internet girlfriend, jollyrancher82, The Monarch refers to him as “that chode she’s with.” Instead, it gets subtitled as, “That dude she’s with.”

Ugh. I can’t even finish the episode. Just allow me to finish by saying this isn’t unique to the Venture Bros releases. Metalocalypse is pretty bad with the subtitling as well, although oddly enough not that bad when subtitling the characters with the weakest grasp of English, Skwisgar and Toki. As an example, William Murderface would rather “chop off [his] ding dong than admit booze wasn’t food.” Ding dong gets subtitled as “dingle,” although when Toki repeats it one line later, it’s subtitled correctly.