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A comment on Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the World. Parent comment

Re:Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the W... by andrepd on Sunday June 25, 2023 @04:37PM (#36472348)
Dogmatix is an especially brilliant one, since the original is Idéafix (stubborn, single-minded, literally "of fixed ideas"), and the translation not only manages to preserve that meaning but also add "Dog" to it :)
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Re:Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the W... by srean on Sunday June 25, 2023 @04:54PM (#36472488)
Exactly! The translators did such a fantastic job over all. I would have imagined that kind of humor to be untranslatable.
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Re:Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the W... by jacquesm on Sunday June 25, 2023 @05:23PM (#36472726)
Same with the Muppets, whoever translated that show was doing an amazing job.
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Re:Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the W... by antod on Sunday June 25, 2023 @06:17PM (#36473208)
Yup, even as a kid I could tell the translators also had to be comedic geniuses too. I would constantly be marveling at the names, and how they were only a joke that made sense in English.
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Re:Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the W... by poizan42 on Sunday June 25, 2023 @10:12PM (#36474924)
The original name would work in English too though. In the Danish translation the dog is is just idéfix which works just as well in Danish.
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Re:Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the W... by schoen on Sunday June 25, 2023 @11:33PM (#36475454)
English does have the loanword https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/id%C3%A9e_fixe#English but I think this is often considered technical vocabulary (per Wiktionary, in psychology and music composition) that most native speakers would probably not recognize.
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Re:Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the W... by poizan42 on Monday June 26, 2023 @10:43AM (#36480250)
I meant that idea and fixed are both English words, so it should be possible to associate ideafix with "fixed idea" - a bit more obscure though than the original.
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Re:Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the W... by YeGoblynQueenne on Monday June 26, 2023 @03:24PM (#36484515)
Idéfix, not Idéafix! "Idea" is "idée" in French. It comes from "idée fixte" which means fixed idea, like you say, or in other words, an obsession.
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Re:Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the W... by andrepd on Monday June 26, 2023 @05:32PM (#36486173)
Oops, you're right! I was mislead since in my native language, in which I read the books as a child, he is called Ideafix :)
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