Babe, in China was translated as: 小猪宝贝. Literally “a precious shell piglet,” but I guess “Piglet Darling” is closer in spirit. Hong Kong had a similar title: 寶貝小豬嘜. “Darling Piglet.” In Taiwan, the title appears to have been longer: 我不笨，我有話要說. Literally, “I’m not Stupid, I Speak my Mind.”
As for The Crying Game:
China: 哭泣游戏 – The Crying Game
Taiwan: 亂世浮生 – (This one’s rather poetic and doesn’t translate well to English) Ephemeral Life of Troubled Times
There also appears to have been: 臭名昭著的遊戲 Something like “The Infamous Game.”
I’m not looking up the other movies, but you can see someone pulled something out of his nether regions.
Absolutely correct. Regardless of what the filmmaker may INTEND for the smoking to stand for, for something set in the present day a person who is smoking will come across to many, many Americans as stupid.
regarding smoking - IF ONLY it were stigmatized as much in the US as people here seem to think it is. US teens still take up smoking in great numbers. Sad
No, it’s something the character does in the book on which the film is based. The director refused to remove that detail, something for which he got criticised because Smoking Is [del]The Devil[/del] Bad. I happened to be working in France when the movie was released and that detail got a ton of mileage in the talk shows and the free newspapers.
The Guy taking The Girl in his arms to walk into their house/bedroom/hotel room. Maybe it is because the guys who do it irl often take it for granted that it will be understood and accepted, but it’s one of the big hurdles of US/non-US partnerships: many non-US women feel assaulted when their man grabs them without warning, bumps them against one or more doorframes and drops them on the bed, all while the woman is saying “what are you doing? put me down! Let GO!!!”
When we see it in an American movie we know it’s supposed to be romantic. When we see it in a non-American movie, the reaction often is either that the characters are stupid (they are copying the gesture because “people do it in the movies so it’s cool”) or, if a certain stupidity on those characters’ part hasn’t been already hinted at, that the director is a moron.
FWIW, in France at least most superheroes keep their English names - Superman is Superman, Batman’s Batman and so on. Wolverine *used *to be translated as Serval back in the day (had to change his animal too because the French name for a wolverine is “Glouton”, meaning, well, glutton) but I think he’s been proper Wolverine since the movies.
Nightcrawler’s actually the only one I can think of ATM that got changed - he’s known as Diablo here. Why change it from one foreign language for another, and why choose a Spanish name for the X-Men’s token German ? Fuck if I know. Probably to spite and confuse as many people as possible at once.
We pronounce them our way though, of course, so we know that Speedehrmahn has his webs and such
Superhero names are generally treated as proper names in German translation, i.e. it’s Superman, Batman etc. in German. In the case of Wolverine it’s a good idea too - the species is called Vielfraß i.e. glutton in German - same thing that Kobal2 mentioned above for French.
This is easy to remember, as I only had 3 or 4 Batman comic books as a kid (shitty Mexican vampire films on TV were free): In one, the baddie was a German (A Nazi? I 'unno, it was almost 50 years ago) who called Batman, “Fledermausmann” and also, “Fledermensch.” Which means nothing–could have been the writer getting it wrong, or maybe the Nazi was making it up as no one in Germany had seen a Batman before. You decide.
I recall a comic from way back where Batman elicits an EL HOMBRE MURCIELAGO! from a low-life right before our hero grimly threatens to knock the guy’s teeth out.
Can you picture Batman breaking into Der Joker’s lair in Berlin, and the Hench-menschen blurting out, “Fledermausmann”? Batman would have them subdued before the second syllable.
In French, a “tuna” (un thon) is used to describe an ugly woman. Actually, it can be used to refer both to an ugly man or woman but it tends to be used more for women. So, there a potential for a big cultural misunderstanding here.
My daughter was watching a kids’ cartoon movie the other day where a joke that was repeated again and again and again was “that’s my duty,” pronounced to sound like “doody,” and ha ha, doody means poo. Thing is, in the UK we don’t pronounce duty as doody, and we don’t use the word doody either, so the “joke” fell completely flat. And they must have made it about twenty times.
