Re:Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese
by pdpi on Monday November 11, 2019 @07:06AM
(#21504097)
> All too often with language pairs as distant as English and Japanese, you just end up writing your own joke.
There's a few specific cases of this that I quite like — the English translations of Asterix did a tremendous job of renaming all the characters in a way that's consistent with the spirit of the (idiomatically french) original jokes.
A personal favourite of mine, though, is a particular dialogue from Austin Powers[1] where the Portuguese subtitles found a joke that was just not there in the original. "It's a bit nutty" doesn't have a good idiomatic translation, so they instead translated it as "Tem muita borra" — Literally, "there's a lot of grounds in this", but "borra" can be read as either "grounds" or "poop".
There's a few specific cases of this that I quite like — the English translations of Asterix did a tremendous job of renaming all the characters in a way that's consistent with the spirit of the (idiomatically french) original jokes.
A personal favourite of mine, though, is a particular dialogue from Austin Powers[1] where the Portuguese subtitles found a joke that was just not there in the original. "It's a bit nutty" doesn't have a good idiomatic translation, so they instead translated it as "Tem muita borra" — Literally, "there's a lot of grounds in this", but "borra" can be read as either "grounds" or "poop".
1. https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/austin-powers-the-spy-wh...