They usually have the original actors record a non-swearing track, so they can sell the television rights.
I just came from that other thread too. Took me a few seconds to figure out why the thread on subtitles was talking about genocide.
LOTR had one error in Spanish. 99% of the LOTR movies dialogue is straight from the books, and said exactly as in the books, but one line was different. Boy, did the theater rumble, with every single viewer saying the “real version” out loud! Specially when 4 out of 8 viewing rooms where showing it and had the same showtimes. They said “los reyes antepasados” instead of “los reyes antiguos”, but research among local nerds has shown that in one particular and quite old translation, they are referred to as “los reyes antepasados”. So we forgive them, sort of.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air almost flopped in the US, but it was already being “located” to Spain in a most unusual way. The Spanish version was so succesful that the producers decided to go ahead and to use the same kind of translation in other countries. It worked.
What was unusual is that most Spanish-language viewers have never watched Oprah, but we know that
a. she’s some kind of big TV person
b. she’s black
c. she’s got some kind’a stuff going on with her weight
from remarks about her in sitcoms. That’s right, every reference to TV, movies, pop stars, brands, whatever, gets left in as-is.
In Fresh Prince, they changed all those to local references. So instead of someone trying to imitate Oprah without ever having seen her, we’d get someone imitating Maria Teresa Campos.
It was like the difference between Babelfish and bilingual. Sadly, most non-bilingual people feel safer with Babelfishy translations because they don’t understand the differences in punctuation, phrasing, etc. I think in three languages and they all use different punctuation rules.
That would be Natsuko Toda. The translator’s name usually appears on screen right at the beginning of the film, before the director’s, or right at the end before the credits start rolling, which gives the translators a fair measure of celebrity in their own right. Toda is the biggest of them, doing the translations of all the top movies.
In addition to occasional mistakes (like the LOTR ones), she’s caught some flak for whitewashing lines that referred to Japan or the Japanese in an unflattering way (“Vanished like the Nips at Nagasaki” in The Man Who Wasn’t There just became “They vanished” for example).
Where did you notice that? I don’t remember having ever watched in France a dubbed american movie with french canadian voices (the accent is, indeed, very different).
Maybe the movies I’m seeing in the US are also intended for Canadian distribution, so they’re letting Quebecois customers know they’re getting the local dialect.
Little Nemo, I suspect that is the case. Was the movie on a DVD with Region 1, and was it originally not in French? Canada is apparently considered part of the US for some film-distribution purposes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many DVDs issued in Canada and the USA are given French translations with Quebec rather than France in mind. The use of differing televison standards in Canada and France would reinforce this.
(It also makes building a library of French movies interesting…)
I watched Amélie last night and even with my almost-nonexistent French I noticed a couple of oddities… when the narrator mentions the atmospheric pressure near the end, the subtitle says ‘999 millibars’. I was waiting to hear ‘neuf cent quatre-vingt-dix-neuf’ but the narrator gave a figure in kilopascals. I think that happened with a temperature as well: the original French was in Celsuis and the translation was in Fahrenheit.
These are obvious measuring-system translations for the US market, but they sure seem odd to Canadian ears.
I’ve noticed the same thing in error going the other way as well: listening to the French soundtrack of the Canadian edition of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the radio in the background at one point gives the temperature in Celsius! Since the story was set in Chicago, this measurement should not have been converted!
I know someone who subtitles movies for a living (she used to be a court stenographer), and apparently subtitling, even English subtitling on an English movie, is often done multiple times for different markets. Apparently for legal reasons, the closed-captioning type of subtitles often have to be recreated anew when a movie is broadcast–they can’t just save the subtitles from the last time. No, I don’t quite understand it either. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting her.
This is sort of a can of worms amongst French Canadian cinephiles. There is a French law that stipulates that the dubs of movies distributed in France must be made in France. This has always peeved people in other countries as it effectively closes the market to dubs made, say, in Quebec.
Major studios, of course, prefer paying only for a dub “made in France” rather than making an additional one for the Quebec market. However, the Quebec public generally prefers movies that have been dubbed in Quebec. It doesn’t have much to do with accents (Quebec actors who do dubs typically speak with very neutral accents) and much less with national pride. The problem is colloquial expressions. Quebec is geographically and to some extent culturally closer to the US than France. As a result, vernacular expressions in Quebec are perceived as more appropriate for American realities. Imagine a Mexican movie dubbed in a relatively neutral American vernacular, versus the same movie dubbed in a noticeably British English. Which would you rather watch? On the other hand, European movies dubbed in France pass without problem in Quebec.
(The best example of French-from-France dubs that are unbearable to Quebecers would be any movie that features baseball. Despite the demise of the Expos, Quebecers are quite fond of baseball and have been ever since the game was created. As a result, all baseball terms have French translations… that are unknown in France. Instead, French-from-France dubbers invent words out of thin air.)
So. The UDA (union of [Quebec] artists) started a campaign to try and get more films dubbed in Quebec, thus getting their members more jobs. Some advertisers and distributers have taken to put signs stating that the dub was made in Quebec, since that’s what people want to watch.
Anyway, for those who read French and want to get an idea of the situation, you might read this article (pdf!) which gives a good overview.