Ever since stakeholders in the Yoruba genre of Nollywood realised that there is a huge market for them outside Yoruba land, they came up with English subtitles for their works to be appreciated by non-Yoruba viewers.
Unfortunately, most of them have goofed in this area. If you sit down to watch Yoruba movies, you would be appalled by their English subtitles.
Terrible punctuation, bad grammar, as well as pure trans-literation, seem to be the order of the day, even as credit would be given to a subtitle editor. If you love yourself, just listen, instead of trying to read what was said.
Just read the following. “The person you killed is dead”, “Why are you behave like an insane?”, “Does he bought them on your name?”, “Thank God. You are conceive of pregnance?”, “That is why you see a professional driver hits by a learner”, “What if I do not good morning?”
The irony of spelling error is that many of these videos parade educated actors and actresses with degrees in humanities. It is therefore a thing of concern because it can be concluded that those subtitle editors are either illiterate or just determined to murder English language in every way they can.
However, any film a particular Abiola Hughes works on rarely has any grammatical blunder, while some people like Tunde Kelani, Funke Akindele and Kunle Afolayan are doing a good job with their subtitling.
Good copy editors abound in Nigeria; so the producers of such movies can leverage the social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) to contact some of these good hands, to, at least, minimise these errors.
