The Uncanny Absence of Idioms in Subtitles

I've never translated anything except the most basic sentences from foreign language textbooks, so I can't totally sympathize with their conundrum, but I feel for those tasked with writing subtitles for foreign films. I think a big reason why foreign films are often considered aloof or incomprehensible has to do with the crevasse between the words as heard uttered from the actors' mouths and the words as read on the screen. There's a lot of alienation going on there and it is reasonable that it puts off most people.

The weirdest thing, though, for even experienced subtitle readers (anime, foreign films, very-very-quiet screenings) is the total lack of idiomatic language in many subtitles. It's difficult, because even if what the actors are saying basically means something equivalent to an idiom in American English, the translator can't really use that idiom. It would sound really bizarre if Marcello Mastroianni said someone was a "dead ringer" or a "flash in the pan." But idiomatic language is an essential element of almost all communication in English and probably is everywhere in the dialogue of most foreign films. Just one of those layers of meaning that I'll probably never be able to unravel...

Jimmy Connors is my favorite tennis player of all time

Now, before anybody gets the wrong idea, in no way am I anything remotely approaching a serious tennis fan. I bear it no ill will, but I'm not exactly David Foster Wallace. Yet, Jimmy Connors is unquestionably my favorite tennis player.

Why Jimmy Connors? I'll readily admit that not once have I seen him play tennis. I was not alive the last time he won a major tournament. Why do I admire Jimmy Connors so much?

The first time I even heard of Jimmy Connors was when this huge new house was going up near my neighborhood. It was ridiculously mansion-sized, especially compared to some of the smaller houses around. It even had a smaller house around back which was rumored to be used for a variety of purposes. The neighborhood kids theorized it was a gigantic doll house, a butler's house, a pool house (though I do not think there was a pool), or half a dozen other things. There was a huge fountain out front and a gate surrounding it.

This house was being built by Jimmy Connors for his fuck-up brother. After its construction, for whatever reason, there was a huge controversy about its financing and nobody ever lived in it as far as I can remember. The developer then had huge problems trying to sell the house to somebody else because nobody really wanted to live in a house that outsized all the other houses around it by a wide margin and, actually, nobody really wanted to live in Belleville. The house became kind of a blight on the entire Oak Hill neighborhood. The Oak Hill swimming pool (it was the cool pool because it was under a dome and you could swim in it all the time but everyone knew that the fun pool was Dorchester [my pool] where you could play tennis baseball and adults could drink Zima) was shut down and filled in with cement.

So to summarize, Belleville is kind of a screwed up place. This little anecdote does very little in explaining its true nature, but to do so would take a work on the magnitude of one by David Foster Wallace. It's where I grew up and it's where Jimmy Connors grew up. So that's why I like Jimmy Connors.