The ideal thing would be that a literary saga was translated by the same person, and it is also ideal when you get to translate a whole series. In audiovisual translation, though, in the road between what’s ideal and what’s real there’s usually a bump called urgency. Because very often the definitive materials are not…
We get the impression that our lives move forward, but I am a huge fan of Los Planetas and I think that we’re constantly turning in circular streams in time. And, sometimes, there’s an intersection in this movement, which, as if we were wormhole explorers, allows us to connect with the past from the present…
On my first day of my first visit to Porto I went to the Serralves Museum, and it was a nice surprise to find there an exhibition curated by Portuguese director Pedro Costa. I have never translated one of his films, but I have synchronized the electronic subtitles of some of them in different cinema…
As a music lover, and as an old chap who was young when the indie exploded, I am very excited about the reunion and tour of the crucial band Bikini Kill. This news has sow in me the seed of hope, as I wish I could see them live in Spain someday. In 2013 I…
This article about the reissue of Nina Simone’s autobiography I put a spell on you, translated into Spanish by Eduardo Hojman and published by Libros del Kultrum with the title Víctima de mi hechizo. Memorias de Nina Simone, has remembered me of the documentary The Amazing Nina Simone, which I translated in 2015 for the music cinema festival In-Edit…
Around the middle of October, my nice and efficient, yet reckless, colleagues who organized the Audiovisual Translation International Conference (CITA), honored me with an invitation to participate in a debate about linguistic supervision. CITA is a biannual event where those who make actors speak to you in your own language or, at least, provide them…
The German Parliament has been celebrating its 130 years of history duiring this last summer and part of the autumn. There have been daily visual shows about its history that used the very building as a screen. The multi-language subtitling system was quite ingenuous. The audio, with the exception of some parts in English was,…
As a translator, subtitling action movies is always contradictory for me. I am talking about the worst action movies: those of patriotic heroes and shots everywhere. On one hand, I find this genre not only boring, but also repulsive. Its flat, no-nuances plots and its clumsy, stale speeches offend my intelligence. I find its gratuitous…
I’ve been countless time watching a video-installation at a museum and I have asked myself, “Who’s the lucky bastard that subtitled this?” That’s exactly why I was so excited when the Centre del Carme Museum of València asked me to subtitle an 80 minutes video by German artist Grace Schwindt, which is included in the…
Can someone who does not eat meat translate a documentary about the quest for the best steak on the planet? He can, indeed, because to do some research about the differences among wagyu or angus beef or the meat of an aged ox in some hidden corner of Leon, Spain, does not mean that you…