Dubbing

That spiderman bite thing is a great example of foreign languages having to work around puns.

Now what's really messed up is the French dubbing of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If you remember, François Truffaut plays a French scientist who cannot speak English very well and they have to bring in a translator. Well in the French dubbing, they say he's the Spanish translator for the opening scene, but then somehow becomes Truffaut's right hand man, and they keep talking back and forth, completing sentences and questions for each oher, to other people they talk to, it's kinda weird.

One really extreme exsample is the German dub for Starship Troopers.

They censored the classroom scene with the dubbing.

Instead of the fall of democracy, and how military took charge in Germany there is a "first bug war" introduced.

Also there are other smaller things like:

Original: "Join the Mobile Infantry and save the world. Service guarantees Citizenship."

Dub: "Treten Sie der Mobilen Infanterie bei und kämpfen Sie für die Zukunft."

translated to englisch: "Join the Mobile Infantry and fight for the future."

And:

Original: "Citizen rule. People making a better tomorrow."

Dub: "Unsere Kinder. Wir müssen sie schützen."

translated to english: "Our children. We have to protectd them."

In Death Note there's inconsistencies which crop up half way through on the official subtitle tracks that are absent in the dub. In particular the word "Shinigami" is subtitled "Shinigami" as well as in the dub in the first half. The second half the subs translate it as "Death God" or "Gods of Death" depending on the context. Which is weird as IIRC the dub was absent that inconsistency.

In the original Star Wars, the famous line by Han

"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"

Was translated in italian as

"Viaggiare nell'iperspazio non è come spargere fertilizzanti da un aeroplano. Senza i dati esatti potremmo volare attraverso una stella o avvicinarci troppo a una supernova. E il vostro viaggio finirebbe prima di cominciare. "

Which translates back to:

"Flying through hyperspace ain't like spreading fertilizer from a plane. Without precise data we could fly right through star or get too close to a supernova. And our trip would end before it's begun."

Yeah, that plane stuff is really out of place in Star Wars, isn't it?

And for some reason the word "clone" wasn't used when Luke mentioned the Clone Wars to Obi Wan. Instead the dialogue referred to some mysterious "quoti" which literally means "quotients", as in "result obtained by dividing one quantity by another"... It's weird because the concept of clones and cloning wasn't exactly unheard of in 1970's Italy... Go figure.

Other than that, the dubbing was top-notch in this film.

My good friend thxita actually has a blog about this sort of stuff. It's all in italian, though...

http://doppiaggiitalioti.wordpress.com/

Well that's what dusting crops are... Spreading fertilizer or pesticides from a plane, but I guess Italian has a literal term for it and the translators didn't really understand the feel of the universe...

Mavimao said:

Well that's what dusting crops are... Spreading fertilizer or pesticides from a plane, but I guess Italian has a literal term for it and the translators didn't really understand the feel of the universe...

The translators probably had a brain fart there. If you analyze that quote they actually spelled it out:

spargere= to spread
fertilizzanti=fertilizer
da un aeroplano=from a plane

Where instead the original version just said "dusting crops", Han didn't specify the method or means... As I said, probably a brain fart.

But the biggest irony in all of this, is that the italian for "light-saber" is rendered as "spada laser" which literally translates to "laser sword", thereby reinstating (unknowingly) George's original vision! XD
It should be said that the literal translation would've been much less elegant,  as "sciabola-di-luce" doesn't quite have the same effect, the same kick, and it's also longer....

Yeah, should we mention........ "Flash Gordon"?? LOL

Funny, they kinda use the same word in French for lightsabers as in Italian : "sabre laser", which translates to... Laser saber.

Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Like you said, "Sabre de lumière" in French just sounds funny and long.

The funny thing about the French dubbing of SW is that they went out of their way to change characters' names and the name of ships and other things to make them sound more "Frenchy" for the first film... And then decided to do a kind of 180 for Empire and made the translation more "literal". They even changed the dubbing actor for Darth Vader for the next two films. I personally hate D.V.'s voice in the first film (sounds flat and the voice effect they use sounds cheap) but other people disagree. You decide:

http://youtu.be/NUtRdVMqErY?t=4m12s

http://youtu.be/_m7JifBw0CM?t=6m27s

http://youtu.be/UQVV-IW2Vsc?t=42s

yeah, the first film's voice sounds kinda plain, the one in empire strikes back is "impressive. most impressive"... really, it sounds pretty close to james earl jones to me. I loved it when he said "Non, je suis ton pére"...