Think Translating Opera For Surtitles Is Tricky? Try Putting ‘Porgy And Bess’ Into German Or Spanish

It’s not just a matter of slangy terms like “happy dust” (German and Spanish have their own words for cocaine). Finding equivalents for the contractions and non-standard grammar in the libretto’s “Negro dialect” (as the Gershwins and Heyward called it) is challenging in itself, let alone when you only have 72 characters per screen. Here’s how the translators did it. – The New York Times