I watch a lot of foreign language films, and read a lot of translated literature and I always try to imagine what I’m missing out on by not reading or taking in media in it’s original language.
In film, are there some significant mistranslations that has led non-native speakers of the language to interpret something different from the movie?
Thanks!
I’m not familiar with either of those incidents, can you elaborate?
Yes, I can’t imagine how many countless times mistranslations have occurred and audiences in one country think something means something it just doesn’t mean.
It was a common issue with anime localization in the 90s, especially when it came to media for children.
The “jelly donuts” from pokemon were actually onigiri, but the translators thought that American children wouldn’t know what a rice ball was, so they just called them jelly donuts.
In Sailor Moon’s case, the network would not let them show a full-out lesbian couple in a cartoon for children, so they were rewritten in the dub to be cousins instead. Standard 90s homophobia aside, that one was especially egregious because you could very clearly tell they had a romantic relationship, so it just made them look like incestuous lesbians instead.
Haha, oh awesome. Thanks.
I’ve only watched a couple episodes of pokémon and just a few clips of sailor Moon, but now I’ll have to dive into the American incestuous cousins, that’s pretty hilarious. “Don’t make them lesbians, just make them cousins that hook up. Americans understand that.”
Although I’m also surprised that Japanese anime had an openly gay couple. It seems like they give their artists broad license with respect to government and popular cultural sentiment , but it’s still such a conservative country, especially in terms of homosexuality, that I wouldn’t have thought Japanese networks would’ve allowed a lesbian couple to appear on popular anime.