Transcribing Sherlock into Spanish

spanish
An update on my goal to transcribe BBC’s Sherlock into Spanish.
Author

Vishal Bakshi

Published

February 20, 2023

Sherlock Holmes kneeling next to Toby the bloodhound and pointing, likely towards where he thinks Toby should go next

Transcription Progress (00:06:07 out of 17:40:32 transcribed)

Background

I have watched all four seasons of BBC’s Sherlock probably 5 times. I learn something new about it each time.

I have tried to learn Spanish using Duolingo, stopping and re-starting every year or so, without much success.

I don’t really recall how the thought came about but I decided to combine my love of the show with my desire to learn Spanish into one project—this one!

Setup

Using the embedded Google Translate UI and my partner’s translator-level knowledge of the language, I am transcribing every word of the show into Spanish.

A screenshot of my translation setup: Google Translate embedded underneath the search bar—the result of googling “Google Translate”. I’ve typed “Sherlock Holmes” in the “English” textbox on the left and it has translated to “Sherlock Holmes” in the Spanish output on the right.

In a second tab, I have the show open (with subtitles on).

A screenshot of Sherlock playing in the Amazon Prime Video player

I transcribe in a .txt file titled transcript.txt, documenting the following fields:

  • season number
  • episode number
  • timestamp (hours::minutes:seconds)
  • who is the speaker?
  • the english transcription of what they say
  • the spanish translation of that
  • notes which usually documents specific word translations

As an example, the first bit of dialogue in the series is John Watson’s therapist Ella asking him “How’s your blog going?” which translates to “Cómo va tu blog?” Where va = goes.

How goes your blog? I would say quite well heheheh.

season,episode,time,speaker,english,spanish,notes
1,1,00:01:30,ella,how's your blog going?,cómo va tu blog?, va = goes

What I’m Learning

I’ll write in this blog post some examples of the translations and how I’m thinking through the process, as well as what I’m learning from discussions with my partner.

Three main themes I’m seeing so far about translating from English to Spanish:

  • which words to use depends a lot on context.
  • words that sound the same but mean different things will sometimes have different emphasis.
  • a word that is technically correct may not be used frequently in conversation.

I’m not quite sure how to best document what I’m learning so I’ll just start writing.

Ella: “You haven’t written a word, have you?”

Something I enjoy doing is translating the Spanish back into English without changing word positions. The benefit of this exercise of translating and translating back is that it reveals (or focuses my attention on) nuances I wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.

English: You haven’t written a word, have you?

Spanish: No has escrito una palabra verdad?

Back to English: Not you have written a word true?

I asked my partner how she would translate it and she said: No has escrito ni una palabra, verdad?

Which translates to: You haven’t written not even a word, true?

It bothers me that I don’t know why in English the question ends in have you? but in Spanish it ends with true?. Of course this may just be how Spanish works or how conversational Spanish works.

I asked my partner how you would say just have you? in Spanish and it’s lo has?

Google Translate aligns with this when it translates from Spanish to English:

Spanish: No has escrito ni una palabra lo has?

English: You haven’t written a word, have you?

But recommends ending with verdad? when I translate from English to Spanish.

Speaker: “You can share mine”

Here are the Google Translate forward and backward translations:


English: You can share mine.

Spanish: Puedes compartir el mio.


Spanish: Puedes compartir el mio.

English: Can you share mine.


However, if I start the Spanish translation with tu the English translation matches my original prompt:


Spanish: Tu puedes compartir el mio.

English: You can share mine.


I think this is a good example of how what is technically correct may or may not be what’s used in conversation—saying tu may not be strictly required for conversation and may be implicitly understood because of the form used—puedes (you can).

Spanish English
puedes you can
puedo I can
puedemos we can
pueden they can

Lestrade: “Well, they all took the same poison.”

Something else I’ve enjoyed and learned from is watching how a translation changes as you type the full sentence in Google Translate.

For example when translating from Spanish (pues, todos tomaron el mismo veneno) to English (well, they all took the same poison):

Spanish English
pues well
pues, todos well, everyone
pues, todos tomaron well, they all took
pues, todos tomaron el well, everyone took
pues, todos tomaron el mismo well, they all took the same
pues, todos tomaron el mismo veneno well, they all took the same poison

What I’m observing might have less to do with how Spanish works and more to do with how Google Translate works. Although some words seem interchangeable (todos seems to mean everyone or they all).