More translation work today, and that’s always good news. I generally work with something playing on the TV in the background (for fear that the full force of my intellect, if applied to the text undiluted, might burn out my computer ). Today I’ve been watching something a friend recommended, an Icelandic mystery series on Netflix. It’s called The Valhalla Murders.

Since I never worked on this project, I can comment freely. I won’t describe it in detail tonight – it’s no formula-breaker. At the center, as has become almost mandatory these days, is a Plucky Single Mother. It ain’t entertainment in the 2020s, unless you’ve got a PSM in there. Also a local boy who moved to Norway because he has Issues, and is not happy to have been ordered home to help the Reykjavik police – who aren’t that happy to have him in the first place. Nor in the second place, because when he shows up he’s Intriguingly Rude to everybody.

But what surprised me was the subtitles. I always turn the subtitles on with streamed movies nowadays, because I’m old and sometimes dialogue gets garbled (don’t tell me I’m going deaf, you whippersnapper).  You don’t have to use subtitles to watch it yourself, mind you, because it seems to have been double-filmed – the actors are speaking English in the English version. (Though some of it looks like it was overdubbed. Not uncommon even in English-language productions.)

But here’s why I’m confused. What I’ve learned through being a script translator is that the people who write subtitles NEVER look at our translated production scripts. Because of this, the subtitles tend to vary quite a bit from what we wrote (translation is more subjective than I care to admit). They usually seem to have been produced through transcription by someone watching the film. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But in this production, the subtitles vary extremely from what’s being said by the actors. It looks very much as if the subtitles were produced by following a production script in English, like the ones I and my co-workers do. But that those scripts weren’t used for filming the English version.

Maybe they do things differently in Iceland.