I’m watching a rerun of The Big Bang Theory in syndication right now. The scene I just watched involved a joke based on misunderstanding words. Amy says that she saw a handsome guy and said “Hoo.” Sheldon took it to mean that she said “Who?” Hilarity ensued.
I’m sure TBBT has been translated into Spanish by now, but I’m guessing Amy won’t say “Quien” when she sees a hot guy in the Spanish-language version; nor will she say “Doko” when she sees a hot guy in the Japanese version.
How would something like this be handled? How about in a general sense, where a joke relies largely on wordplay that won’t necessarily translate?
That’s naturally one of the harder challenges faced by a translator, that and in-culture references.
And the simple answer is that much of the time, they simply aren’t translated. Either they’re replaced by a totally different joke if the translator is good, has enough time to come up with one what with most TV dubbing being done on shoestring budgets and the tightest delays imaginable, or we find ways to work around them. Or just skip them and chalk it up to “lost in translation”.
Sometimes the translator will try to make up for lost jokes by adding some of his own, in the same tone, somewhere else they might fit (Patrick Couton, the designated French translator of Terry Pratchett’s works, is positively admirable at this for example), sometimes not.
And sometimes they drop the ball altogether and both nix/are oblivious to what’s funny about a given joke yet still keep all the dialogue that *results *from the joke, which as you’d expect turns the whole thing into a weird, incomprehensible mess of whut?!. Not all translators are created equal and, well, like I said, shoestring budgets.
You might recall what happened when censors got hold of The Big Lebowski and tried to make it “family friendly” by re-dubbing all the cursing, and how “this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the arse !” turned into “this is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps” ? Same ballpark.
The best translations of puns and allusions I’ve ever see are in the Asterix comics translated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. They are hilarious. Even if there isn’t a direct equivalent of the French joke, Bell and Hockridge manage to come up with ones that are just as funny. I’ve read a few Asterixes in German too, and it seems as though those translators are just as good.
The worst translations I’ve ever seen (or heard) were done by East Europeans who hadn’t a clue as to what’s considered funny in English. Watching The Simpsons with Russian overdubbing can be positively painful.
Some years ago, I watched Duck Soup on TV in Switzerland with French subtitles. At one point in the scene where Groucho is trying to seduce Mrs. Teasdale while Harpo and Chico are sneaking around inside the house, Harpo accidentally turns on a player piano. What I heard was:
Mrs. T: “What was that?”
Groucho: “It was probably just mice.”
Mrs. T: “Mice don’t play music.”
Groucho: “Oh yeah? What about the old mice-tro?”
Now, “mice” in French is souris, which doesn’t pun on “maestro.” What I read was (and yeah, my written French is shit. Go with it.):
Groucho: “C’était probablement des rats.”
Mrs. T.: “Les rats ne jouent pas de musique.”
Groucho: “Non? Qu’en est-il le rats-ody?”
Of course, that was a classic movie. I don’t know if the people who dub a hundred or so sitcom episodes all at once have the time to put that kind of thought into it.
I was amused by how Obelix’s pet hound is Idéfix in the French original and “Dogmatix” in the English translation, and how these terms are near-synonomous, but the English term is more on the nose.
In Japanese, the same character can often be pronounced a number of different ways. When the pronunciation is important, it will be written out phonetically over the character. I sometimes saw this done in the Japanese subtitles for English language films when there was a pun in the dialogue, so someone reading along would at least know that a pun had been made (word X was pronounced like word Y) even if these words sound nothing alike in Japanese.
My mother used to tell about her college days when she was minored in French. She said one of the hardest things to do was translate a rhyming poem and make it rhyme in the new language. Sometimes it involved a major rewrite of several lines. At least she didn’t have to sync the reader’s lips to the translation.
I can’t say if it’s true but I’ve heard that wordplay is much easier in English than it is in most languages. English has a larger vocabulary than most languages have so it has more possibilities for wordplay. If this is true, it must make it difficult for people translating wordplay from English to other languages.
All of which is beautifully lampooned by Python when they tried to weaponise the world’s funniest joke by translating it into German one word at a time so no one translator would die from exposure to the lethally funny joke.
Curiously, shows like 'Allo 'Allo and Hogan’s Heroes have been translated into German. A native German speaker of my acquaintance tells me that they essentially have to rewrite the whole thing around the visible action.
'Allo 'Allo! is a British comedy set in wartime France. The running joke is the language play. Standard French speakers use English wiz Franch accants, Germans speak Cherman accented English. An English airman who is disguised as a gendarme uses badly mangled English, eg ‘Good moaning’, ‘My Fronch could be butter’ and so on, to represent his schoolboy French. Other English escapees speak normal English. All the foreigners freely converse with each other using their various accented English but none can understand the English, unless translated by one of them into a parodic Wildean toff’s English.
In a sense it is probably easier to translate because its about using language stereotypes rather than language itself.
The two French comedians who were tasked with dubbing Wayne’s World found it a bit challenging to tackle the “… NOT!” routine because French syntax gets in the way. Negating a verb involves putting the word “ne” in front of it, so you can’t really blindside anyone by throwing in the “…NOT!” at the end. Their solution was to use the word “nul,” which means “void.” Kind of ungainly, but I guess they had to think of something.
The first Asterix I saw was one called The Big Fight, wherein there was one panel that had Caesar in his tent up in Gaul (“oh dear, my laurels are all crumpled, I must have rested on them”) and on the wall of the tent, “Rome Sweet Rome”. Curiously, it was right in the panel art, and when I saw an original version in French, the wall of the tent said “Rome Sweet Rome”. It must be one of those expressions like ménage a trois that cross language barriers.
The British spy masquerading as a gendarme was my favorite character (“What? Your pissy is up a tree?”). I particularly loved the following exchange in the cafe:
SPY: Please, could I have a spune for my kiffee?
[The waitress puts a plate with a slice of pie down in front of him.]
WAITRESS: [Sarcastically; she isn’t taken in by his phony accent at all.] 'Ere. I brought you some pee.
How the Russian translators dealt with this, I don’t remember.
“Dogmatix” is funny in the context of his being a hound, but I didn’t realize why he was called that until I read an Asterix in French: he’s called Idéfix because he’s always thinking about bones!
British kids television show The Magic Roundabout worked like that - Eric Thompson (Emma Thompson’s dad, if you’re interested) took the original French animation and wrote whole new stories around it.
Part of the problem is that you can’t say “Heil Hitler!” on German TV, not even in a comedy. When someone gives the Nazi salute, they have to say something like “My dog can jump this high!” They fill in other blanks by, e.g., having Klink mention his cleaning lady, who is talked about but never seen.
Instead of having Newkirk do a Cockney accent, he stutters; the Germans (Schultz in particular) do different regional accents that are considered comical.
The series has been run in Germany under at least two different titles; each time, a different version of the dialogue was used.
That is not completely correct.
Basically, it is illegal in germany to display the symbols of anti-constitutional parties and organizations like the NSDAP and its affiliated groups. Symbols are explicitely flags, emblems, uniforms, slogans and salutations.
This law does not apply "if the means of propaganda or the act serves
to further civil enlightenment,
to avert unconstitutional aims,
to promote art or science, research or teaching, reporting about current historical events or similar purposes."
So, documentations and the stuff the History Channel and their ilk do have no problems. Unless the documentation is pro-nazi propaganda.
For entertainment, you have to prove that it is art, and German courts tend to be rather stuffy, so funny things are less likely to be accepted as art than dramatic or somber stuff. Computer games seem right out - for Wolfenstein, the regional court even refused to begin consideration of the question.
OTOH, the constitutional court has decided that pure made-for-profit works can be art, too, they do not have to be preachy or pretentious.
Apparently, the relevant Indiana Jones movies and Inglorious Basterds are acceptable as art, since there was an attempt to censor them. Today, I guess Hogan’s Heroes would be accepted as well. The translators’ attempt to work around Nazi slogans or parody them might come from the opinion that Germans usually will find “Heil Hitler” not funny at all.
Tl; dr: Often, networks and publishers just want to make very sure that there will be no legal trouble.
In the French-language movie City of Lost Children, the three main characters (One, Miette, and Kranc) have names with meaning in three different languages: One in English, “Miette” is “crumb” in French, and “Kranc” is “Sick” in German (I think). At one point, One has lost his tiny friend Miette and thinks she’s gone forever, so he’s drowning his sorrows in a bar, and a prostitute is trying to distract him. It’s working, until she says something like, “Well, you haven’t tried me yet!” and One moans, “Miette!” and starts to sob.
It’s a brilliant bit of translation, because in French the character also says a sentence ending in the sounds “me yet,” so the pun in French also works in English. I don’t know what the character said in French, though.
When I studied Spanish in junior high, there was a limply humorous reading passage designed to illustrate the word “tutearlo,” which roughly means “use the informal ‘you’ with thee.” It obviously lacks a good English translation. The formal word for “your” is “su” which is also the word for “his.” Anyway, the idea was that Carol went to the beach, and some dude stole her stuff while she was swimming, and some other dude saw and was trying to tell her. “This dude just left, and he took ‘su’ stuff!” he said to her. She thought “su” meant “his,” and she was all, “So what, dude?” until Bill asked “Can I tutearlo?” at which point he could explain it to her using “tu” for “your.”
Great explanation, right? Maybe someone can explain it more clearly.
Anyway, our hilariously incompetent Spanish speaker asked a roomful of apathetic junior high kids to read the story aloud, only translating it into English. There’s no elegant way to translate it, so the story was completely incoherent.
Personally I thought it made the whole thing much funnier.
There is Isaac Asimov’s short story “Death of a Foy”, which is simply the build-up for a bad pun. It uses the anatomy and customs of the titular alien species to get the ending “Give my big hearts to Maude, Ray. Dismember me for Harold’s choir. Tell all the Foys on Sortibackenstrete that I will soon be there.” as a parody (?) of “Give my regards to Broadway”
The German version simply as every word translated literally. Completely pointless.