TheThirdGathers said:
I was just saying that the one with the subtitles is equally baffling, for example at the beggining the words are right there but Stars Wars becomes Star War and so on. The one with the subtitles was brought over by this guy Wintersson and he said they made it before it came out in theatres, so I don't know if it's such a stretch for people with those kind of recources. I mean, how do people still a huge Hollywood movie in the first place?
Actually, the subtitles are not baffling at all. It is very common. I spent a good deal of time in various countries where bootlegs are the only way you could buy movies, just about all of them had engrish subs. I first saw Fellowship of the Ring in the form of a bootleg with engrish subs. At the end of the film where Gimli says, "Let's go hunt some orcs!" the subs read, "Let's go hunt some ox!" Most the rest of the films subtitles were as incoherent and ridiculous as Backstroke of the Wests.
As for stealing big Hollywood films, that is not a hard thing at all. The copy of Fellowship of the Ring I had featured a scroll that would periodically go across the bottom of the screen stating that it was issued as a screening copy for the MPAA ratings board and to call this 1800 number if you purchased it. Screeners used to leak all the time, sometimes several weeks before the film is released to theaters. In the event a screener wasn't leaked, the movies were usually cams (someone in a theater filming the movie while they watch it).
Since neither screeners nor cams come equipped with subtitles and are being sold in non-English speaking countries, a translator will watch the movie and translate it. Other pirates that want to sell them in other countries will reverse translate those subs into English to market to a wider audience (English is widely known, and it is usually a lot easier to read a foreign language than it is to understand it spoken). I suspect some of the subtitles I've seen have been the original translators subtitles simply thrown into a translation algorithm like google translate to create the English sub. Alternatively, some of the Engrish subs I've seen have had close enough approximations to the English words that I got the impression someone who didn't know English very well simply watched the film and transcribed it (like having the word "ox" for "orcs", that doesn't seem likely to be a translation problem, but rather an interpretation issue).
Very few resources are needed for any of this. Once the pirated video is acquired, the person who acquired it can simply spend a few hours translating it, slap some subs on it, and run a bunch of tapes through a VCR and WHAM, he is selling the latest new release on a street corner in Hong Kong (or wherever). The fact that the English in Backstroke of the West is so incomprehensible is actually is very telling of how few resources the person/people involved actually have. For example, they clearly don't have anyone that speaks or reads English at their disposal.
However, voice actors (with suspiciously impressive American accents) reading those subtitles out would take a lot of resources. And it is a practice entirely unheard of. It doesn't happen. There wouldn't be any point. The film is already in English. There is nobody out there that only speaks and understands Engrish. The only reason Engrish subs get made is because official sub tracks don't exist for these films at the time they are being bootlegged.
This thing didn't come off a DVD from China, it is clearly fan made, and I am pretty sure most people who have read this thread have managed to put two and two together by now. Damaged DVD indeed. ;)
Anyway, to whoever did it, brilliant work! I can't believe I am just now seeing this thread.