- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They/Them
I think we can all agree that translating stuff is hard and translating literary texts is even harder. On the one hand you want to stick as close to the source as possible, but on the other hand cultural context, puns, word games, metaphors are just some of the things that can turn a word by word translation into nonsense. It might be memorable nonsense, but nonsense none the less.
But this thread is not about those problems, it's about translations / localisations where you don't understand why they did them, or that result in something funny.
Now, I made this thread, because I was looking on Amazon for "Into the Spider-Verse". The problem was, that I only found an UK import and a film with a different name and the same cover. After a bit of checking, I found out that Germany didn't get "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", we got "Spider-Man: A new Universe". If it had at least been a title in German, for example "Spider-Man: Ein neues Universum", I could have understood it, but this? This just looks to me like someone thought we Germans would be too stupid to understand the original title.
Of course, Marvel movies have often different names in Germany. Going from sensible translations (The Incredible Hulk -> Der unglaubliche Hulk), to a head scratcher like Thor 2 (Thor: The Dark World -> Thor The Dark Kingdom) and finally landing at the absolute ridiculous. Cap was never lucky with his film names (Captain America: The First Avenger and The First Avenger: Civil War), but the Winter Soldier translation really takes the cake. "The Return of the First Avenger" is not only stupid, but doesn't even make sense, since Cap returned in Avengers.
The funniest translation error I've found has got to go to the original translation of the first four Harry Potter books. Because unlike original!Harry who only played Exploding Snap, German!Harry played Snape Explodiert (Exploding Snape). Sadly this was changed in book 5 an all ongoing reprints into the much more correct and vastly less funny "Zauberschnippschnapp".
Despite this change and the fact that I only read fanfiction in English, "Exploding Snape" will always be part of my head canon.
For example, I'll probably never forget one line from the German version of Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Because they took the line "Are you a Mexican or a Mexican't" and translated it as "Bist du ein Mexikaner oder ein Mexikanernicht". Which, I guess is technically a translation, but no, just no...
But this thread is not about those problems, it's about translations / localisations where you don't understand why they did them, or that result in something funny.
Now, I made this thread, because I was looking on Amazon for "Into the Spider-Verse". The problem was, that I only found an UK import and a film with a different name and the same cover. After a bit of checking, I found out that Germany didn't get "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", we got "Spider-Man: A new Universe". If it had at least been a title in German, for example "Spider-Man: Ein neues Universum", I could have understood it, but this? This just looks to me like someone thought we Germans would be too stupid to understand the original title.
Of course, Marvel movies have often different names in Germany. Going from sensible translations (The Incredible Hulk -> Der unglaubliche Hulk), to a head scratcher like Thor 2 (Thor: The Dark World -> Thor The Dark Kingdom) and finally landing at the absolute ridiculous. Cap was never lucky with his film names (Captain America: The First Avenger and The First Avenger: Civil War), but the Winter Soldier translation really takes the cake. "The Return of the First Avenger" is not only stupid, but doesn't even make sense, since Cap returned in Avengers.
The funniest translation error I've found has got to go to the original translation of the first four Harry Potter books. Because unlike original!Harry who only played Exploding Snap, German!Harry played Snape Explodiert (Exploding Snape). Sadly this was changed in book 5 an all ongoing reprints into the much more correct and vastly less funny "Zauberschnippschnapp".
Despite this change and the fact that I only read fanfiction in English, "Exploding Snape" will always be part of my head canon.