Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

Last week, I finally saw Pacific Rim, one of the most anticipated Hollywood movies of the season. It features fancy giant humanoid machines called Jaegers, an exciting soundtrack, saving-the-world-from-apocalypse heroism, poignant moments of brotherhood, and goosebump-arousing scenes of Jaeger pilots fighting monsters - but none of that prevented the poorly translated on-screen Chinese subtitles from occasionally pulling me out of the action and ruining the experience.

To start with, "Jaeger" is translated into Chinese as zeiou, a kind of seabird, which sounds neither cool nor familiar to the audience.

Not to mention that the movie began by clearly stating that "Jaeger" is a German word meaning "hunter."

"Today, we are cancelling the Apocalypse!" Wow, this statement probably would have gotten everybody's adrenaline pumping … if it hadn't been for the lousy, lengthy Chinese translation: "Today, we are terminating the doomsday prophecy that is recorded in the Apocalypse."

But those are nothing compared to mistranslating "sort of" as "softer" and "populated" as "polluted."

The worst example was the translation of one Jaeger's trademark punch (the "Elbow Rocket") as the "Pegasus Meteor Fist," a term borrowed from Saint Seiya, a Japanese manga series which used to be very popular among Chinese teens. For five minutes after I saw the phrase, I wondered: "Why on earth would the pilot say something like that?"

The translator in question, Jia Xiuyan, later explained that she knew the director Guillermo Del Toro to be a big fan of Japanese manga, and that the word choice was "paying respect to Japanese animation."

Well, as someone born in the 1980s, I am no stranger to Japanese comics - of course I know about the Pegasus Meteor Fist. But you know what? I pay a lot of money for a movie ticket, and want to be completely lost in the world of awesomeness created by the film. I don't want any stupid subtitles screaming at me: "You are only watching a movie! It's not real! And by the way, how smart am I? I know something about Japanese comics and that the director is actually a fan of Japanese movies!"

In conclusion, one doesn't need much proficiency in English to tell that the translator is very inexperienced and didn't do sufficient background research.

Translators these days tend to use catchphrases that are already behind the times, or Chinese slang that doesn't sound right because those foreigners aren't speaking authentic Chinese dialects.

Other movies like Madagascar 3, Les Misérables and Skyfall have been criticized by upset viewers who found bugs in the subtitles. The anger of the audiences is growing. To be fair, Jia just happens to be in the line of fire this time.

Nobody will ever agree what the perfect translations should be like. But subtitles should at least not cause the audience to think less of the movie itself.

It's not like we don't have good translators. Many non-official fansubbers might have done a much better job. And yet these few controversial translators are still translating movies, one after another.

After all, if you're spending millions of dollars to make a movie, you should be able to afford to employ a qualified, experienced translator who knows what he or she is doing.