>Close to the English: "Otolaryngology Clinic" It seems English is a lot more succinct than other lang's. I've often noticed this when watching sub-titled films: the speakers rabbit on for ages, beating their gums, and the sub-tile in English can be said in a trice.

On the contrary, my dear Watson. You can't compose an English sentence without some essential gadgetry lying around. Most of the time you can't omit pronouns, must have the article, and generally need lots of those small words to dispell the ambiguity of your combined verb-noun-adjective wildcards. Therefore, you need extra words that could be omitted in other languages. Here's my attempt to shed some light on (*) the issue.

Example:
"Navratio mi zet sinoć" - word for word, "navratio" - dropped by; "mi" - to me, or my; zet - brother-in-law; "sinoć" - last night. Can you say that any shorter than "my brother-in-law dropped by last night"?

Example 2:

"Vodi slep sakatog" - "vodi" - leads, "slep" - blind (adj. m.), "sakat" - crippled adj. m., "sakatog" - accusative case. So, "The blind one leads the crippled one". Which of the seven words here can be omitted without producing a gramatically imperfect sentence? The original sentence is a perfect simple-extended sentence in Serbian.

The point of the movie transcripts being so short is that they at best translate about 30% of what's said. I've seen some Yugoslav movies with English titles, and even when they carry the basic meaning, they still don't carry any of the undertones, and most of the time miss the point of a joke (which actually was translatable, but they didn't make the effort (*)).

Most of the time I was watching English-language movies translated to Serbian (or then Serbocroatian), and, well, we did have a few geniuses back in 60's to 90's, who managed to translate up to 80% of the stuff, and even got the atmosphere, undertones etc. Checking on them was great fun - speaking both languages makes a dumb movie more interesting :).

Nowadays, I've heard nobody pays the proper translators, except maybe the public TV, and most of the translations come from, ahem, substandard morons who couldn't translate their date of birth properly.

----
(*) "Make the effort" is translated with "potruditi se" - a simple reflexive verb. Likewise "shed light on" - "rasvetliti".