>>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.
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>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.

Ah well, I guess I haven't seen too many Serb movies, sub-titled or not. For that matter, the only Serb I've experienced is from your posts and, despite being a "linguaphile", like yourself, it SCARES me! :-) But most other sub-titled movies I've seen, this is the case.

However, I thought we'd discussed, in an earlier thread, how long-winded Serb was cf. English? Maybe my memory serves me badly.
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>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 dropped by last night"?

But you picked a long-winded word "brother-in-law" as an example. How about "Dad" or just "Brother". And, it might look shorter but the English is only ONE SYLLABLE more, despite this!

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>Example 2:
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>"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.

According to your translation, you said "The blind leads the crippled", in English "The blind man leads the cripple" - 1 syllable more.

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>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).

I was referring mainly to other languages, not one as sophisticated as yours, with all its nuances. No wonder they don't do a good job. :-)