I’m looking at the settings in the menu now.
PLAY FILM French Audio
PLAY FILM Italian Audio
PLAY FILM Partial English Dub
Alex Cox commentary
Austin Fisher on the Specialists
Original English Script
French Trailer
Italian Trailer
What did you choose to get subtitles only in the missing bits?
I chose PLAY FILM Partial English Dub.
This had English subtitles all the way through.
Yes indeed. For instance, according to my Italian Grammar book, you can say
“Does Carlo write with a pen?” three ways, each one using the upward inflection at the end to indicate a question, rather than a statement.
Carlo scrive con una penna? (Carlo writes with a pen?)
Scrive Carlo con una penna? (Writes Carlo with a pen?)
Scrive con una penna Carlo? (Writes with a pen Carlo?)
Not with me … perhaps the settings on your player are causing you to get the wrong set of subtitles? … Why not play the film again and flick through the subtitle options manually? Of course it might be a little confusing when they all say ENGLISH, but they should be numbered. Good luck
Of course it would. Especially if it was American English, ha ha.
The trick to translation is to capture the meaning of the words, not the words themselves. The problem with European language structure is that they often put a word at the front when you would put it at the end. So if it’s a name or a word similar to English - Pistol/ Pistola, you’ve heard it in their language two seconds before you read it in yours. But if you subtitle it with your word at the same position as theirs, the sentence can feel clunky.
In The Specialists, the English Subtitles have a very different rhythm and tone to the spoken English. Which is why when the audio skips from one language to the other it becomes nonsensical.
My general annoyance with poor subtitles (and I’m not saying the Specialists subtitles are bad) is that if you get an Italian speaker to translate Italian into English, you get a worse job than if you get an English speaker to translate from Italian into English (And vice versa). The reason being that an English translator will understand the Italian and put it into good English. An Italian translator would not be as familiar with English nuances, and fail to capture the way we say things. But he’d be very good at translating English into the Italian that Italians speak.
Yes that’s it, thank you.
I have a Sony BluRay player with 5:1 audio.
To check your audio and subtitles, you have to go through a list on the pop-up menu.
So I chose PLAY FILM Partial English dub. It started, and I chose the pop-up menu to see what subtitles I’d got. It just said English. I thought it should say English partial or English 1, but it just said English. So I pressed to move to the next one and it said OFF, so I pressed again and it said English. I assumed that this was the same English I started with, but it wasn’t. If I had pressed again, I would have realised, but I didn’t.
So thanks for clearing it up. I’m glad I discussed this now.
OK, another SW ordered tonight, or rather 2, but it is May God Forgive You I Won’t that I was inspired to buy in my chronological search for interesteing SWs
Well, the DVD hasn’t arrived yet so my appreciation of the SW is not known yet, but usually my selected SWs end up as a 6 or 7/10 which is good or very good. Clearly I have great benefit from your’s and other aficionados’ reviews and opinions in my own selection process of the above average films.
Ah. My bad.
Based on your previous posts though I think you’ll like it well enough. It’s definitely one of Harrison’s best. Vengeance is the only other one which comes close to it I think.
It’s not dvd quality it’s just atrocious The dvd should look better, the blu-ray has been DNR’ed to hell. It looks like they cast the movie in a wax museum. Raro is a very hit and miss company unfortunately.