Good Engligh Subtitles for Baaria

So I made my friends sit through Baaria even though the subtitles were horrible. In the end the subtitles were so bad that I had to rewrite them using Subtitle workshop (an excellent program that I recommend). You can find them at opensubtitles.org.

Translating the film posed several difficulties. First, I couldn't find a copy of the film with the original Sicilian dialogue, just the dubbed into Italian version. Granted, this made translating easier since Sicilian dialect dictionaries are rare outside of certain FBI training programs. Still I don't like the idea of doing a translation of a translation.

Another big issue was the expletives and put-downs. Here's an incomplete list of them and their clearest translation:

ignorante: ignorant person
vastaso: ill-mannered person (comes for the word for "porter" for some reason)
cornuto: literally, to have horns. Used to mean "cuckold".
faccia di porco: pig-face
camurria: an annoyance
craistuneddu: craistu means "kid goat" and eddu is the negative diminutive so this means "bad little kid goat"
vergogna: shameful act. also, shame itself.
morto di fame: literally, dead from hunger. Used to mean "poor person" or something like that
schifo: disgusting thing
fottere: to screw someone over
coglione: balls, ass, or dick. It's not clear. Often used in the construction "scazzare i coglioni" which literally means "to wreck someone's balls/ass/dick" but which isn't accurately translated as "bust your balls" since that phrase mostly means to give someone a hard time verbally.

Most of these don't have simple one word equivalents in English and when they do they don't carry the same amount of vulgarity: either too much or too little. Consequently in my translation the grandma has a bit of a potty mouth even though she doesn't really in the Italian version.

This brings us to the most difficult word of all: Minchia. This means penis in Italian but is used as an all purpose expletive. Where American's would say "oh shit" or "damn!" or any other one-word expletive that opens a sentence (e.i. "Fuck, that's big!") Italians use "minchia". They will also shorten it if they have nothing to express other than astonishment: "mi....!". In one particular case I wrestled with how to translate a particularly difficult usage of minchia for two days before I settled on "no shit". And this doesn't even go into trying to translate all the variations used like "minchiata" screwed up situation, "che minchia" which means something like "what the hell?" and "minchione" which my dictionary gives as idiot but whose construction renders is more like "big fat dick".

Besides the curse words I didn't run into many idiomatic issues. An interesting exception is that at a certain point someone says that a medicine makes him see "green mice" which I translated as "to see pink elephants". I couldn't resist the opportunity to translate one idiom with another of such similar construction even if my friends didn't know that pink elephants was an actual English idiom and not just a Dumbo reference.