Member Article

Badly-captioned Queen fails to impress

An Australian showing of the film The Queen inadvertently turned into a farce due to a subtitling error. The film was being shown to an audience of the deaf and hard of hearing by a council in Sydney, but the captions didn’t quite follow what was happening on screen…

“Buckingham Palace” appeared on screen as “Burking in Paris” while the question “did you vote?” flashed up as “dead in a boat”. When a character spoke about former prime minister Tony Blair being “educated at Fettes”, it appeared on screen as “educated the fattest”. The line “every newspaper proprietor has blood on his hands today” became “every newspaper proprietor has blown in his hands today”.

Organiser Derek McCarthy conceded that the captions, produced either by a crude computer translation programme or somebody with only the faintest grasp of English, were bizarre.

“The copy shown did have some spelling mistakes and interpretations of the script which affected the experience for the deaf community present,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .