Stranger Translations

(spoilers for Stranger Things season 3 through episode 3)

There's some dastardly Russians in season 3 of Stranger Things! And they have a ~secret code~. How will our heroes ever translate it?

Gotta find out what those Russkies are saying

First, let's take a look at the Russian text itself:

Неделя длинная

Серебряный кот ест

Когда синее встретиться с желтым на западе

Поездка в Китай звучит неплохо

Eсли быть осторожно

I'll talk about the English translation in a moment, but first let's talk about the translation process.

Dustin, Steve, and Robin listen to the recording over and over and use a dictionary to translate the code. Although they do get points for realizing the difficulty that comes with a new alphabet, there's a whole lot of hand-waving in how they get the translation. Robin "has a good ear" and speaks other languages. So theoretically, she should be able to (as in the show) hear the sounds, figure out the right letter, and look it up, right?

Maybe if it were Spanish, sure. But Russian doesn't quite spell words phonetically (though it's nowhere near as bad as English). Certain unstressed vowels get "reduced" to others, which would cause Robin's "good ear" to hear a different one from how the word is spelled.

Let's take the last word as an example: осторожно

The transliteration, that is writing it in the equivalent Latin characters letter by letter, would be "ostorozhno."

But no Russian (including the speaker on the tape) would pronounce it "oh - stoh - rozh - no," the way it is written. With vowel reduction, it's actually pronounced "ah - sta - ROZH - na," with the first and last vowels reducing to an "ah" sound, and the second reducing even further to something close to an English schwa. So Robin would hear these sounds, not the ones that correspond directly to the letters. If she's looking under "a" in the dictionary, she will never find осторожно. The same goes for many of the other words on the tape; a non-speaker would never be able to look them up based on sound alone.

Let's actually talk a bit more about the word осторожно. First I want to look at the English translation given in the show:

The week is long

The silver cat feeds

When blue meets yellow in the west

A trip to China sounds nice

If you tread lightly

Back to our word осторожно, which as I mentioned was the last word in the code. It means "careful." Here is a more direct translation, with the differences in bold:

The week is long

The silver cat eats

When blue meets yellow in the west

A trip to China sounds not bad

If you are careful

So the show's translation is actually pretty good, as far as meaning goes. But in the show, they don't just go by meaning, do they? When Robin breaks the code, she realizes that these are references to places in the mall. And what's the last one?

Kaufman's Shoes, upper left

Yup. The shoe store. Because "tread lightly" refers to shoes. "Tread lightly." You know, the words which never appear in the Russian original at all?

Now, I don't want to get down on the Russian translator. They did a phenomenal job with what they were given, which I'm sure was the already-written English "translation." They translated the meaning of the text, rather than literally word-for-word, which is what a good translator should do. But nobody bothered to let him or her know that the show was going to refer to the English idiom literally. And I'm not sure why the writers assumed Russian would use English idioms in the first place.

It just goes to show: always check your translation!

What I think about this translation

Sadly, this is still one of the more realistic uses of translation in entertainment. Once I think of/find more examples, you can be sure I'll complain about them here.