Category: Translated and/or subtitled by me

Russian humour – Stairwells and Sleeper Carriages…

Original YT playout date: 24 December 2009
Duration: 1:45

These two short sketches from a Russian production company have been shown quite a bit in YouTube but never yet have they been adequately subtitled for a wider audience. As part of my quest to help people gain an understanding of the Russia psyche and Russian humour, here is a version subtitled by me, for your viewing pleasure.

To see much more of this sort of thing, go to this chap’s channel – http://www.youtube.com/user/bahitkilibaev. As far as I know he owns the stuff, but I just wanted to give it a more adequate translation and thus broaden the audience for a couple of sketches. He has several hundred sketches, so Russian learners looking for things a bit more ribald (and I have had numerous requests for this) will find plenty of material on his channel.
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Russian Fun on the Train

Original playout date: 21 February 2008
Duration: 0:40

This is another of the times when I basically only provided a translation of some clip not available in English to give it a new lease of life. There were not such stringent copyright issues then as there are now, but still in the main owners of these things haven’t been that bothered unless they really wanted to to their own English versions, which for these sketches isn’t that likely as one cannot always guage the humour. Only very visual, almost slapstick styles of humour like Benny Hill, Mr Bean and Just for Laughs have really managed the world circuit. Jokes per se are often simply untranslateable, and at best they create a challenge to the translator, which is exactly why I like to play around with them.
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In the Defence of a Lady

Original playout date: 22 December 2007
Duration: 2:18

One of the most watched videos on the channel with more than half a million views, this is not by me, this is an example of some dozen or so occasions where I just took a clip that was not available to an international audience, added subtitles and internationalised it. There have been no complaints or claims by the actual owners, who are shown in the clip, a famous cabaret (sketch show as we would put it) from Poland.
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Daft Copper

Original playout date: 18 June 2007
Duration: 0:27

Ths was someone else’s video in Russia, all I did was subtitle it. There are a few vids on the channel where all I was doing was making Russian or Polish or other content available to a wider audience in this way.
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LPR Super Party

Playout date: 24 October 2006
Camera: WM Capture/Recorder/Converter
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker – slight use
Location: Nowy Swiat, Warsaw
Other people featured: Not known
Genre: Nicked for subtitling
Music used: None
Languages used: Polish
Animals featured: None

This is probably the first example I can think of of when I have simply taken a film from another source and added subtitles in translation.  As a rule I don’t do much third-party stuff on my channel, but there are three cases where I do. The one case was the radio stuff which Stuart Heron captured the video for and I added to my channel with the agreement of play radio. Another case is Soviet films which actually belong to everybody and which have not always been shown in full on YouTube.  In these cases I have put them on if I had them.  The third case is where I have taken something which is vailable and popular but not yet in English and I’ve taken it in order to produce the English version with a translation given as subtitles.  This is an example of this case.
It has become one of my most popular videos, and to a degree I think I foresaw that it would be. I uploaded this from the office while working with another colleague, and that colleague and I were checking back every so often looking at the views which hit a hundred on the first day. I wasn’t used to that back then and I’m still not really used to it although it happened one or two times since.  One thing is sure Polish people are heavy users of the Internet especially you Tube and they do like their politics.

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