How is Doc Brown’s catchphrase “Great Scott!” rendered in other
languages? And if the foreign langauge version was translated literally
word for word back into English what would it become?
For example, if the Spanish version of the film translates “Great Scott!”
into “¡Caramba!” then translating the Spanish word back to English would
give us something like “Wow!” or “Gee!”
Googling, I see that the French version is “nom de Zeus”, which is really disappointing. I really wanted Toubib Marron to run around yelling “Zut alors!”.
It’s more difficult when the specific idiom is a key part of the dialogue. For example, I was listening to an interview with someone who translated movie dialogue. He translated ‘Good Will Hunting’ into French. There’s a line where Matt Damon’s character says to a romantic rival “do you like apples?” “Uhh…yeah.” “Well, I got her phone number. How ya like them apples?” He said he could not come up with any turn of phrase in French that would work in the same way, and had to settle for something that didn’t really fit.
I watched Spaceballs in French (La folle histoire de l’espace) and the gag about Lone Star jamming the radar/giving them the raspberry (with a jar of raspberry jam) was impossible to translate.
Ha, that’s a funny one in the German dub: they translated it as “Yippie-ya-yay, du Schweinebacke”, which means “Yippie-ya-yay, you pig cheek”. Nobody knows why…
As a consumer of the to English captioning and dubs I think I’d often prefer certain idioms just be translated literally or not at all, rather than trying to find an equivalent English idiom. The idiom sounds odd to me? So what?
So why not just a Hebrew version of “Scott Gadol” instead of something completely different?
Funny you mention, in 1990 or so, we took Spanish in Junior High. At the time, a certain television show was launching and the plucky bad boy character had a Spanish catchphrase: ¡Hay Caramba!
We dutifully looked it up in the Span-Eng dictionaries we’d been issued and found it translated to, I’ll never forget this, “Great Guns!”
A year later, “Hasta la vista … Baby.” was the new Spanish catchphrase on the schoolyard.