I was watching a Leave It To Beaver marathon on Friday and you know how they always put bits of trivia in between episodes, one of the trivia bits was:
Well I don’t believe that first of all, because well there are no wombats in America but I still know what a wombat is.
But it got me to thinking, first of all is that above statement true? Second of all, are there titles of films or TV shows or songs that have been changed to other things like the above example. If so what are they?
Does that mean the Tennessee Williams play gets called “Night of the Beaver”? Sounds a lot more racy that way…
Yes, the title of a work often gets changed in translation. Some examples -
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay was published in two volumes in German; Der Fluch (The Curse) and Der Hoffnarr (The Court Jester)
A Morbid Taste for Bones (the first Brother Cadfael mystery) by Ellis Peters became In Namen des Heiligen (In the Name of the Saints)
The Princess Bride by William Goldman became La Storia Fantastica in Italian.
The French opera ‘Faust’ by Charles Gounod in referred to in German as ‘Marguerite’. (because the Germans feel it’s a complete travesty of Göthe.)
For that matter, Comme un roman (‘Like a Novel’) by Daniel Pennac has been translated twice into English - once under the title ‘The Rights of the Reader’, once as ‘Better than Life’.
Gary Marshall claims Joanie Loves Chachi had to be renamed in… Korea? somewhere in Asia anyway… because Chachi meant penis in the local language, but others have since claimed this is bullshit.
The first Harry Potter book went from Philosopher’s Stone to Sorcerer’s Stone when it came across the Atlantic, and the movie changed likewise.
Well, there was the Japanese manga—and later movie(s) and TV series—Kokaku Kidotai (roughly "Mobile Armored Riot Police), known in English as Ghost in the Shell.
What I want to know is if “Ghost in the Shell” sounds like an improvement when translated back into Japanese, or just sounds stupid and clunky.
Sounds unlikely to me, because there aren’t any iguanas in the Philippines either.
So what do they do, dub the other characters calling the kid “Iguana”?
(I can almost hear Eddie Haskell doing it.)
Speaking of which, could you imagine a family show today called “Leave It To Beaver”?
The Christian Fundies would be up in arms, and late night talk shows would have a field day.