Living in China I get to watch a lot of...ahem... locally produced... DVDs.
Naturally these have Chinese subtitles to go with the western content. Often though, names go untranslated being rendered as English script in the middle of a line of Chinese script.
In a program I was watching a character said, "As Shakespeare said,'it's better to have loved and lost'..."
The subtitles corrected it to "Alfred Lord Tennyson".
The correction is accurate but I'm sure that the 'mistake' was intentional. The program was Big Bang Theory and it's not the kind of thing they get wrong. It was the character getting it wrong, not the writer.
I wonder whether the reason for the change was that the translator thought it was a genuine mistake or simply thought that the audience wouldn't get the fact that it was intended.
William Labov, RIP.
6 hours ago
