Entertainment For Lively Minds
Tin-eared Translations
Posted by Hawkfall on 4 October 2011 - 3:16pm.
I see that BBC 4 are showing the Inspector Montalbano films. Moreover, I notice that this week's episode has had it's Italian title, "Gli Arancini di Montalbano" translated as "Montalbano's Croquettes". How is it that something that sounds so beautiful in the original language when translated sounds like something that you'd find in the deep freeze section in Lidl during Italian Week?
And can anyone think of other examples when a translation sucks all the poetry from the original phrase?
- More from Hawkfall.
- Login or register to post comments
-
Die Fledermaus
The Bat, tee-hee
How about…
"Zwei glorreiche Halunken"? Better known internationally as "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". in German it means something like "two magnificent scoundrels" - pretty creative heh? - whereas the international title captures the essence of the Italian "Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo" rather well.
German translations
of film titles tend to go from the boringly literal to the downright strange.
Bridget Jones's Diary somehow became Schokolade Zum Frühstück (Chocolate for Breakfast). Made in Dagenham was released as We Want Sex.
Orson Welles' great cinematic masterpiece, Citizen Kane
is known in Swedish as "En Sensation" ("A Sensation").
Erm ... yeah. Right.
Dubbing and subtitling
There's an article in today's Independent on this topic -
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/how-to-du...
We had the Montalbano on down here in Oz
The local channel SBS (multi-cultural remit) did a fine job on the sub-titles. If they get those pulled in you'd be fine.
The first HJH film, Dick Lester's "A Hard Day's Night"
was known in Sweden as "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"
Two Men: One Fate
The Spanish distributors must have seen the first word of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and assumed they were dealing with a proto-Brokeback Mountain.
The distributors here seem to think titles should be descriptions. All comedies, for example, must be clearly flagged as such by containing the word "loco" (crazy) in the title. So it's "Crazy Police Academy" in Spain (to make sure nobody thought it was a law-enforcement training film), while Mel Brooks's Men in Tights got a double dose, as "The Crazy, Crazy Adventures of Robin Hood, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail was "The Knights of the Round Table and Their Crazy Followers". Snappy, huh?
But some of them are simply bizarre. Alien could have been rendered as Alienígena without any difficulty, but no; it's "The Eighth Passenger". Total Recall is "Total Challenge", which is not only wrong, it doesn't even mean anything. And even The Sound of Music is Sonrisas y lágrimas - "Smiles and Tears" - here, which sounds like nothing so much as Ingmar Bergman having an even worse day than usual.
Guerre Stellare
See? Even Star Wars sounds better in Italian.
"La guerra de las galaxias" (The War of the Galaxies) in Spain
See? Like I said, they just can't leave well alone. (Distributor: "We can't call it La guerra de las estrellas because people will think it's about Hollywood actors hating each other.")
Dragonheart en Espanol
I remember watching Dragonheart in a Spanish train (do they still put on films?) and I was struck by the fact that that the Spanish actor who was dubbing Sean Connery actually went as far as putting on his speech impediment, so it was "Yo Shoy el ultimo" and "Shi! Tienesh que matarme!". Very weird.
Same in German
I watched The Rock on German TV once and the bloke doing the German dubbing was doing all the sh- stuff as well.