As you yourself acknowledge, stuff like this can be a headache even for the most conscientious subtitler.therewillbeblus wrote: Fri Oct 28, 2022 3:27 pmTo clarify about the subs, I don't necessarily mean stricter adherence, but more thorough mining of the text which makes it come across more naturally at times. For example, one of the more exciting and pronounced changes I noticed on the new ones is that the diary entry on Agnes' computer at the start is actually translated out- whereas it's severely truncated on the old R1 DVD, in part likely because the shot length isn't very long
To cite an example from a disc that I personally oversaw, as soon as I saw this in the rightsholder-supplied translation...
...I thought, "well, obviously I can improve on that!"
But in fact I couldn't, for multiple reasons.
On the most superficial level, while I could have matched the text word for word, where would I realistically have put it? There simply isn't room for a three-line subtitle that doesn't encroach on the important part of the image. So regardless of what I ended up doing, I'd probably have been limited to two lines maximum, which I could just have squeezed in either at the top of the screen or between Kieślowski's hand and the top of the burned-in Polish text, still allowing for a gap that would make it instantly clear that it's not part of the same wodge of text - instant graspability by the reader being a crucial part of the subtitling process.
But the other problem was that someone was talking at the same time, and obviously that needed to be subtitled as well, and there was clearly only enough time left to convey the barest minimum translation of the caption. (When you reverse-engineer stuff like this with the aim of improving it, it's quite often the case that you end up understanding and increasingly sympathising with the original subtitler's thought processes!)
For the record, a full translation would read "Krzysztof Kieślowski's class with students at the University of Silesia, Faculty of Radio and Television in Katowice, 1980". "Krzysztof Kieślowski" can easily be sacrificed, because that's obviously him in the middle hosting the class, and if anyone cared enough about which specific class and which specific university, they'd most likely be able to glean it from the original Polish text anyway. So while it's clearly massively truncated, I don't think it's destructively so - but it's a good illustration of the kind of compromise that all too frequently has to be made. (Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma constantly poses challenges like this, which is why one release included multiple approaches to subtitling it as it was physically impossible to cover everything in real time.)
