My spouse and I’ve been a lot having fun with Netflix’s Higher Than Us, a Russian import about near-future robots. (We have watched the primary 9 episodes, which is to say a bit greater than half of the primary season.) The subject has been lined earlier than, after all, nevertheless it’s all within the execution, and the execution right here typically appears superb. The manufacturing high quality is as much as Western commonplace, it appears to me, as are the plot and the characterization.
The one drawback that I’ve seen is within the subtitles, which are sometimes fairly poor translations of the unique. They don’t seem to be laughable, to make sure, however they’re usually simply not fairly proper. Naturally, I am not insisting on literal translations; the purpose of the interpretation is to seize the sense and the tone of the dialogue, to not present exact word-for-word identification. And naturally there are judgment calls: The Russian title of the sequence, as an illustration, is actually “Higher Than Individuals,” however “Higher Than Us” is a believable English rendering.
However among the subtitle translations simply change the that means, and never for the higher. In a single episode, as an illustration, the Russian phrase for “bitter” is translated as “gross,” when afterward one of many plot components turns exactly on the factor being bitter. And I see that each a number of minutes, in every episodes. It could be that non-Russian-speakers simply will not discover, however I do suppose one thing is misplaced. And Russian shouldn’t be precisely an unique language; how exhausting is it for Netflix to discover a respectable translator?