# When Puns and Wordplay are Translated **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [May 8, 2013, 11:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853 "2013-05-08T23:46:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![President\_Johnny\_Gentle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5f9b8f/32.png) [@President\_Johnny\_Gentle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/President_Johnny_Gentle)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2013, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/21 "2013-05-09T23:27:45Z")
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a very engaging essay concerning this topic. IIRC, it was contained in _Metamagical Themas_. In it, he discussed the difficulty of translating a title such as “All the President’s Men” into French, since a literal translation loses the allusion to the nursery rhyme. The book isn’t as acclaimed as _Gödel, Escher, Bach_, but is still worth seeking out. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/22 "2013-05-10T00:17:58Z")
“This sentence is very difficult to translate into French.” ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 12:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/23 "2013-05-10T00:55:06Z")
One of my old favorites is when Super Chicken was translated to Spanish, in the adventure of the Laundry Man, a Chinese money launderer (Yeah, I know) decides to steal all the money from the crooks he is helping launder the money, and he does a run for it, Super Chicken stops him. Narrator: And the stolen money was returned to its rightful owners, the crooks. Fred: “The CROOKS!?!” Super Chichen: “Fair is fair, Fred!” The Spanish version was even more subversive: Narrator: El dinero robado es regresado a sus duenos, los pillos. Fred: “Los Pillos?!” Super Chicken: “Son los unicos que tienen dinero!”\* - The change was on the last line: “They are the only ones with money!” ---
**Author:** ![\_3Bill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/_/b9e5f3/32.png) [@\_3Bill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/_3Bill)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/24 "2013-05-10T02:02:17Z")
> [@Lamia](#): > > 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. Interesting. Often in ads and such, a Japanese character will be glossed with an ad hoc pronunciation, usually but not always a foreign loan word, like the character for automobile, kuruma, glossed phonetically as “kaa.” in an English class I taught, we watched Broadcast News, about 5 minutes every week, with subtitles and with them masked, and it was a good opportunity for me to see how difficult translations were handled. They pretty much threw in the towel on the dialogue between Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter, just furnishing information for the plot and continuity. “So let’s meet at the place they had the thing that time” –\> “Let’s meet and discuss this.” ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/25 "2013-05-10T04:10:38Z")
> [@Uther\_Penguin](#): > > 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. Well, sometimes translating \*is \*pointless. For example, Georges Perec wrote an entire novel without using the letter “E” once, E being the most common letter in French (one out of six letters on average, apparently). That’s half of the whole point of the story - a kind of detective novel where people are looking for E, which has gone missing. Translate that into, say, Japanese, and what’s the point ? “Ooooh, he’s written a novel where one kanji out of eleventy billion is never used \*once \*!” :). ---
**Author:** ![vontsira](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/51bf81/32.png) [@vontsira](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vontsira)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 7:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/26 "2013-05-10T07:29:32Z")
The " 'Allo 'Allo !" references call to mind a trans-lingual device in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” by Louis de Bernieres, set in Greece in World War 2. A British secret agent is landed on the island where the action takes place, to work with the local resistance movement. The spymasters have made a blunder, in that the agent, “Bunny”, basically does not know the language. The best he can do, is talk in the Ancient Greek which he learned at school – which is so different from modern Greek, that his contacts can only just understand what he’s saying, some of the time. His Ancient Greek speech is rendered in the book, as Chaucerian English: he introduces himself to his first contact, with “I am yclept Bunnios…” ---
**Author:** ![C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b2d939/32.png) [@C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/C_K_Dexter_Haven)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/27 "2013-05-10T12:13:12Z")
Books are easier. My copy of LE HOBBIT has footnotes when the translator couldn’t manage an equivalent pun. “Riddles in the dark” chapter has several. When Bilbo is riddling with Smaug, he makes a pun on “I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me.” There’s a footnote explaining that “L’endroit où habitait le hottib s’appelait _Bag-End_: Fond du Sac.” ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/28 "2013-05-10T12:45:50Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > Translate that into, say, Japanese, and what’s the point ? “Ooooh, he’s written a novel where one kanji out of eleventy billion is never used \*once \*!” :). Actually, the actual equivalent to not using a given letter would be a lot less subtle, but also a lot more interesting - remove one hiragana/katakana pair, and you could easily remove a lot of very common grammatical constructions, and force dozens, if not hundreds of kanji to be glossed with unusual readings. Just removing the hiragana would be easier to write around, and take out the oddly read kanji, but would also stand out brilliantly by forcing katakana to be used where hiragana would normally be used. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 12:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/29 "2013-05-10T12:51:42Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > 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. I was blowing my tea when reading this and almost got hot tea all over myself :mad: 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![Hypno-Toad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@Hypno-Toad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypno-Toad)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/30 "2013-05-10T13:42:35Z")
A similar problem was the “Jive” scene in the Zucker film _Airplane!_ When the Zuckers saw the film in Germany, the audience was dying with laughter at that scene even though it shouldn’t be funny in translation. When the Zuckers asked, they were told that the black guys had been given thick Bavarian accents. June Cleaver volunteering to translate from “Bavarian” to German perfectly captured the spirit of the joke. ---
**Author:** ![Uther\_Penguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Uther\_Penguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uther_Penguin)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2013, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853/31 "2013-05-11T23:54:31Z")
Dubbing has a bad reputation, but at least in Germany, they put a lot of effort into it - it is called Synchronisation, because making the spoken word and the movement of the mouths match is seen as very important. Using experienced voice actors is quite common, and as long as it is feasible, a Hollywood actor is always dubbed by “his” corresponding German actor, just like you don’t change the voice actor of animated characters without good reason. So the German public “knows” how Sean Connery or Johnny Depp sound. Anyway, when translating Die Hard, they had trouble with the phrase “Yippie ki yay, motherfucker!” because in 1988 leaving it intact would have been problematic. So they came up with “Jippie je jay, Schweinebacke” (pig’s or pork jowl) as an until then unknown insult that did not conflict with Bruce Willis face. off-topic: I just realized from Wikipedia that Mr. Willis’s German voice actor is also the German voice of Gerard Depardieu, Dolph Lundgren, Kurt Russell and James Woods. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-puns-and-wordplay-are-translated/657853.md?page=1)