I’m Shirley, someone who’s lucky enough to be making and translating subtitles for Shoot From The Hip.
While I’m having fun translating, I’ve met so many challenges. As expected, translating comedy is never easy. Word plays are among the hardest parts, that’s for sure, but aside from that, humour is a very cultural thing. Some jokes are very specific to Western cultures, for example, the yo mama joke, or the “That’s what she said” joke, or even bald jokes. Why? Vietnamese men don’t go bald that early or that often, so we just don’t see young bald people on a daily basis, and we just don’t have that type of joke, at least not as much as Westerners.
Real footage of me with SFTH’s contents, restored, colourised.
There has been fun, there have been tears, there have been sleepless nights trying to figure out how to translate Tom’s word plays and AJ’s mistakes. That’s an exaggeration for sure, but there’s some truth to it. I’m starting this blog to share my experience in translating comedy, specifically SFTH’s improv. Each language has its own quirks, so it’s hardly transferable to another language, but I’m sharing regardless, maybe it’ll spark some interest in Vietnamese? 😄Worst case scenario, we’ll be having interesting conversations, so that’s a win.
Let’s get started. First episode coming up soon: Translating Letters.
Hello people, my name is Joanna and I am part of the Polish translation team! Inspired by Shirley and her blog @sfthvnfanpage I decided to copy paste her idea and I am going to discuss the challenges our team faces when translating the boys' videos!
I didn't want to make this side blog so soon cause I am still balls-deep in @sfthbattleroyale but I was summoned today by Shirley so I thought, alright, it's show time :p there is no law saying 3 sfth blogs is too many, so here it is, folks.
What you can expect from this blog? Tears of frustration about AJ's chaotic language use, screaming about Tom's word plays, complaints about the language of the British Isles, thinly-veiled linguistics rants and unintended Polish lessons :)
Puns are true nightmares to translate, and SFTH has loads of them. Do you want to know what’s been keeping me awake at night? If yes, check out this post. I will list the puns by how much I’m satisfied with what I delivered, so the last one is one of my proudest achievements when translating SFTH’s jokes :D
Usually with a pun, you have three options:
find the equivalent pun in the target language, which barely ever happens.
come up with a new pun that has nothing to do with the original pun, but retains the humour
if all else fails, ignore the pun and go cry in a corner
I’ve been defeated once by the triple “bar” pun in the Change - Mediocre Pub video. It may sound impressive, but that’s only because I only finished exactly 50 SFTH videos at the moment I’m typing this post. More defeats are on the horizon, I can sense them all the way from here 😱
Spectre vs Spectator
This one was quite impossible to translate, and I’m not too happy with the “solution” I found.
“spectator” is “khán giả”, “người xem”, “người quan sát”…
“spectre” is “bóng ma”, “hồn ma”…
Without knowing Vietnamese, you can still see those words have nothing to do with each other.
After racking my brain and scouring the Internet, I settled on “người xem” (watcher/spectator), and “người âm” (“people” from “down there”, which is just ghosts). I don’t think anyone would mistake “người âm” to “người xem”, but “spectre” and “spectator” are not easy to be mixed up either. So… let’s blame AJ 😶🌫️
“The kid was dense”
Apparently, AJ doesn’t know what “dense” means, but that doesn’t spare me from translating it 🫠
The “dense” used for AJ can be translated to “dốt đặc”. Concidentally, “đặc” also is the “dense” used for the Rolex watch. However, the “đặc” alone wouldn’t mean “stupid”, “dốt” is the keyword here, “đặc” is just there to emphasise and give imagery. The solution is to put “dốt” in brackets:
Thằng nhóc (dốt) đặc. Đặc như đồng hồ Rolex bị nhồi quá nhiều tính năng.
“I don’t know to from fro” - “I don’t know if I got a fro”
This game is one of the most popular SFTH videos to date, it helped launch the group to their current level of international popularity. I love this video so much.
“Fro” is a hairstyle of black people, and we don’t even have a word for it in Vietnamese. “To and fro” would be “tiến và lùi”, which of course has nothing to do with hair.
Lucky for me, right before that, AJ said “I don’t know left from right”, so I don’t actually have to stick with “fro”, but I still have to ensure Luke’s “You’re bald” make sense. The solution is “I don’t know if my hair is parted right”, which I think fits perfectly for the scene.
Wedding vs Wetting Catalogue
This is a mistake, an unintentional pun, but this time it’s Tom and not AJ.
Tom mispronounced “wedding”, and it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but of course, the man had to turn it into a whole nother (NSFW) joke.
It’s quite impossible to connect “wedding” and “wetting” to make the joke work in Vietnamese, so I switched the word “catalogue” to “menu” and dealt with that instead. In Vietnamese, “menu” is “thực đơn”. “Thực” means “eating”, but it doesn’t work alone as a verb, we don’t say “I thực rice.” However, oddly “xực”, the “mispronounced” version of it does, and it’s quite crude and can be used for suggestive or sexual activities, so it fits incredibly well in the context.
Reverse translation:
The wedding xực đơn here is good, isn’t it?
Although I’m really looking forward to the day we xực each other.
Wales vs Whales
I love how Tom’s limits are tested in this game 😂 Sam was ruthless.
The Wales - whales pun is quite clever, and it turned the whole story into a new direction. It also turned my sanity against me 🫠
Unlike “England” (Anh), or “America” (Mỹ), there’s no Vietnamese name for “Wales”, we just write “Wales”.
“Whale” is “cá voi” in Vietnamese, which is a funny word because it literally means “elephant fish”, but I digress.
“Whale” doesn’t work here, so I switch to “dolphin”. “Dolphin” is “cá heo” (which is “pig fish”; why? I have no idea…). I altered it to “cá hêu”, which sounds close to Wales (pronounced as “guêu”). You see the “êu” sound? It’s close enough to rhyme :D
Nymphs vs Nymphomaniac
This pun is so clever, hats off to Tom. For this section, I’d say “Children, turn away”, but SFTH chose to post this video to their whole audience, so what much could I even do? 🤷🏻
A “nymph” is a mythological spirit of nature. We don’t have a specific translation for a nymph, but the “fae” group can be all translated to “tiên”.
A “nymphomaniac” is someone who’s… crazy about sex. The closest translation I could think of is “người nghiện tình dục” (sex addict), or “người cuồng dâm”, nothing to do with “tiên”.
There’s a cool language trick called spoonerism, it’s when you swap the consonants and vowels between syllables of a word, or words. In Vietnamese, spoonerism is very common, way more common than in English. Maybe it’s because of how our words are constructed, with separated syllables, and a word usually only has one or two syllables, four max.
I took advantage of this, turning the word “điên tình” (crazy about love) into “tiên đình”, and put the original word in brackets. The word itself is not sexual, but that can be implied, and it works so well for the joke.
It’s been a long post, thank you for still reading. There might have been more puns but these are all I remember for now. There will be a part two, at some point, because SFTH throw puns at me constantly, intentionally or not.
The next episode will be about something very peculiar about Vietnamese: Pronouns :D
Letters is one of my favourite games. It’s surely fun to watch, but it can be challenging to translate.
Needless to say, English and Vietnamese are very different, even from what count as a “word”. Unlike other languages using the Latin alphabet, we separate our syllables with spaces:
“Economy” is a word with four syllables-bles.
“Kinh tế” is a word with two syllables-bles.
If you play the one-word-at-a-time game in Vietnamese, technically a player is allowed to say “kinh tế”. But that’s not how people would play this game, there would be debate on if something is one word or two, because sometimes it’s ambiguous.
Even though sometimes it’s impossible, I still try my best to let the players say one syllable at a time. The most difficult one so far must be the Letters to Germans:
That’s 3 more syllables than I’d like, but this sentence can’t be shortened without losing some of the meaning. Lucky me, it still counts as one-word-at-a-time in Vietnamese. My success rate on making it one-syllable-at-a-time is around 90-95%. However, it’s still impossible to make it one-word-at-a-time 100% of the time, I can only get to 98-99%.
Another difficult thing is the sentence structure: In Vietnamese, nouns come before adjectives. We don’t say “a beautiful girl”, we say “a girl beautiful”. In this game, word order matters: Sometimes the “punch word” just comes at a different point:
If I put “eyes” first like a normal sentence, it would spoil the fun (plus Luke’s expressions were priceless). So I had to compromise by putting a blank in there:
Mother won’t look at […] me.
Mother won’t look at eyes me.
This is a neat little trick that I use quite often.
Letters seems to be intimidating at first, but after a while, it turned out to be easier than other games SFTH plays. There is less dialogue, and not as many word plays. Letters quickly became one of my favourite games to translate.
Should I share specific challenges I’ve had with each Letter? Would that be boring?
You think switching pronouns in English is confusing? Welcome to Vietnamese :D
English has 7 pronouns, not counting neopronouns and combined stuff like “y’all” or “you guys”. Meanwhile, Vietnamese has at least 100 I think, I can’t even list all of them. In terms of “true pronouns”, we don’t have that many, but we use nouns as pronouns, and those do count, making the whole situation very complicated.
In English, you use the I-you pair no matter who you’re talking to. In Vietnamese, you have to choose the appropriate pair of pronouns based on many factors: your age, their age, their gender, your gender, your relationship with them, etc., And, the fun part is, choosing the wrong pronouns may offend people. There is more about true pronouns, kinship pronouns, nouns used as pronouns, and other things, but I won’t go into details here. You can check out this Wikipedia post to learn more :D
Pronouns can reflect the relationship between two people and their attitude toward each other. It’s the translator’s job to pick the most appropriate ones for the characters. You can’t just I-you your way through the translation, because it would be stiff as heck, nobody talks like that in real life.
Pronouns among SFTH themselves
SFTH are close friends who met in university (and yes, where you meet your friends can affect your choice of pronouns: friends from school tend to have more casual, affectionate pronouns, while friends from work tends to have more polite, formal pairs). I chose the tui-ông pair for Luke-Sam-Tom, it’s casual, it’s intimate, it’s homies. I can totally see them calling each other with this pair if they ever decide to learn Vietnamese.
It’s a bit more complicated with AJ. In English speaking countries, you’re equal with your friends, no matter how old you are. That’s not the case with Vietnamese people, here we have a hierarchy: You pay respect to the older, and you get respect from the younger, even when you’re only one year apart, except when there are agreements between you otherwise. It’s not as intense as it sounds, but this subconsciously affects people’s dynamics.
While AJ is two year younger than the others, they’re equal friends, with just a little bit of youngest sibling vibes from AJ at most. However, I still chose “em” for AJ (the pronoun for the younger sibling), and “anh” for the others (the pronoun for the older brother). The anh-em pair can be used for anyone having an age gap of up to ~20 years, not just real siblings.
I imagine a conversation between them would go like this:
Tom: Do em want to compère the next game? Anh can do it if em don’t want to.
AJ: Em can do it, thank anh. Anh can compère the next one, is that good?
Cute squid hug just for decoration purposes.
As you can see, Tom would stay as “anh” no matter who’s talking, because he’s the older one. Same would go for Sam and Luke when talking to AJ. I find AJ being “em” very endearing and adorable.
Pronouns between characters
It can be a lot of headache to pick pronouns for characters. For example, the Time Warp with AJ being the creepy dad. Luke calls AJ “dad”, but using the ba-con (father-child) pair is not realistic, since he hates his dad’s guts. My compromise is to put “ba” in quotation marks, and use ông-tôi for the rest of the video. This pair can be used for your male friend in a friendly way, but also can be used for your father or someone your father’s age when you don’t have much respect for him.
Reverse translation:
Long time no see, “ba”.
What the fuck are ông doing here?
In short games, it’s important to have consistent pronouns from start to finish. I have to write them all down into my note app, so the characters don’t randomly change their pronouns midway through. It looks something like this:
1. Luke ↔ Tom: tôi ↔ anh
2. Luke ↔ Sam: tui ↔ bồ
3. Tom ↔ Sam: tôi → anh; anh ← tui
4. Tom → Sam: anh kia
Note how the third one between Tom and Sam has two pairs? It’s because I picked one pair for Tom but another for Sam. Sam was having a German accent, I wanted to reflect that in the choice of pronouns. Yes, accents affect your pronouns too. How fun!
The fourth one is how they’d address each other in third person, that may be for another post, I’ll focus on first and second person pronouns in this one.
The exception is when they play Genre. Sometimes when the genre changes, characters change their pronouns accordingly.
One thing unexpectedly difficult is Flurry. For the introduction, the opening line should be as open as possible, but when they use the line, it’s very specific. So the pronouns change, it’s not the original line anymore. I try to make it vague enough so it fits both situations, but sometimes we just have to accept that Vietnamese is different.
It’s not all bad, it’s beautiful
It is very rewarding when you can express characters’ states and emotions through just the pronouns alone. Normally, your mother would call you “con” and call herself “mẹ” (or “má”, depends on each region). But when she’s mad, she would switch to mày-tao. If you’re in love with a man, you use anh-em, but after a nasty breakup, you’d switch to anh-tôi, or even mày-tao, depends on how much you want him to rot in hell.
I use these techniques in The Unrelenting Aubergine, especially for Titch. At the beginning, Titch looks down on James, seeing him as the lazy useless brother who only plays with the boys and doesn’t pay attention to the important farming work of the family. At this point, he uses the anh-chú pair. “Anh” is still for someone older, while “chú” is for someone younger, but this pair is not as close or intimate as anh-em. You can find this pair in social settings rather than familial ones, and the older one is often seen as more snobbish, a little high and mighty you might say.
Well, chú should have been focused on learning like anh was.
Later down the line, Titch realises his brother actually has valid dreams, and farming is important for him, not his brother. A change of pronouns can reflect this perfectly, that’s why I made him switch to anh-em to show the growth in his character.
Over the years anh was so hard on em, anh is so sorry.
The same happens between Titch and Derek. At first, Titch keeps his distance, he wants to maintain a boss-assistant relationship, strictly business (despite that one night 😉) He uses tôi-cậu, which is often seen between a boss and a younger employee. Later, when he finally faces his feelings, he also changes to anh-em to be more intimate with Derek.
Derek, don’t be like that. Cậu know tôi is married to job.
And anh will give em the most unrelenting aubergine on earth.
Funny enough, only Titch has to change his pronouns. James calls him anh-em throughout the play. Even though James is quite rebellious and stubborn, yelling at his brother sometimes, he still respects and looks up to Titch as the better aubergine farmer in the family. And Derek, he also uses anh-em, do I even need to explain about that simp? 🤭
James addresses Titch with anh-em pronouns right from the start.
Em know em won’t be as good of an aubergine farmer as anh are.
The same goes for Derek.
Em know recently anh have been a little bit barren. But-
This post alone cannot capture a fraction of the full complexity of our pronoun system, but hopefully it gives you some insight to how it is over here and the way it affects translating SFTH comedy to Vietnamese.
What should I write about next? Anything you want to know about translating SFTH videos? My Ask is also open in case you want to stay anonymous :D
P.S.: Colour codes:
blue: English pronouns
red: pronouns with equal social status
orange: pronoun with a higher social status
green: pronoun with a lower social status
*when you thought everything’d go smoothly after figuring out “today embarks on change” but “spectre” and “spectator” hit you like a truck so you’re doom scrolling instead*
Hello! I've only been watching SFTH for a month and I've noticed their videos are now translated into many languages, but not yet into mine. I was wondering how you gets involved in doing this? I'm quite busy right now, but I hope to be able to help one day as well. Thank you for your advice!
Hello! Thank you for your interest!
The translation team is managed by Vanessa, you can contact her on Discord :D (DM me if you have difficulty finding her account, my handle is the same across platforms.)
To start a new language, it’s preferable to have at least two translators so you can proofread for each other. So, look around for someone else who might be interested, then you can contact her to start your team :D
Welcome to the team, and good luck with translating! It’s fun, but it’s also very challenging!
Feel free to DM me or send more Asks if you have any further questions.
Which of the boys' jokes are hardest to translate?
(also I love the Shirley Holmes reference in your desc)
Hi. Thanks for the question :D
Currently, it’s the “bug” joke in that Luke’s mental breakdown Party Quirks game :D They used “bug” with FIVE different meanings. I haven’t figured out how to translate it yet, so I’m putting it aside 🫠
I was defeated once before by Tom’s “bar” triple pun in that one Change in a Mediocre Pub (the one where Tom caught AJ).
