One simple reason: lack of respect to their viewers. They don´t care what they serve us, we´ll be watching it anyways. Quality? What for?

One of my favorite TV shows is “Dr. House”. The (re-run) episode of yesterday is a prime example of what I mean: who cares what crappy translation they use. Let me describe the scene that I´m talking about.

Two of the actors - doctors - are standing beside a patient´s bed and talking about the IV tubes, and how it would be dangerous for the patient if they became tangled. The patient has lost his hearing, so they write a message to him on a little whiteboard: “Don´t tangle the lines”.

Enter the genius translators who did the german synchro; offering their helpful contribution in the form of a short subtitle display:

Don't tangle the lines!

“Verdreh´ nicht die Sätze”. Wow. Translating that back to English, it becomes “Don´t twist the sentences”. I´ll ignore for now the fact that in the German synchro, the doctors are addressing the patient all the time in the more formal “Sie” form (as opposed to the casual “Du” form of address used in this subtitle – there´s no english equivalent to that distinction). But this failed attempt at a translation shows that the person(s) responsible for this didn´t even bother to watch the surrounding ten seconds of the episode to get at least a hint of context. Instead they read the message, and simply chose one of many possible translations, and not even an accurate one.

One could write this off as a little, meaningless mistake, but unfortunately this represents the general attitude of the german commercial TV stations. And these guys wonder why more and more viewers refuse to consume their commercial-infested crap, and to make up for the loss of aucdience are asking for a share of the public TV license fee. Good luck with this, guys.