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!
This makes me think of Pokémon and Sailor Moon. The jelly donut and calling a lesbian couple cousins respectively. I wonder what, in movies, has been edited to either make it recognizable to western viewers or to avoid controversy?
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.
Oh yeah, Japan is a bit weird that way, or it might be more accurate to say that the west is weird.
The anti-gay sentiment you see in conservatives in the west largely stems from Judeo-Christian doctrine.
In Japan, Abrahamic religions are in the extreme minority so oftentimes homosexuality isn’t seen as a sin but rather just something that differs from the norm.
However, Japanese society is also more intolerant to differences, so instead homosexuality ends up in this weird grey area where it’s used mostly for drama or humor in the media, but in real life it’s very much a case of “don’t ask, don’t tell”
That’s what I meant by how conservative Japan was, they appear to give more license to caricatures and stereotypes in their arts than they would allow in society, but that does not leak into day-to-day life, the government and the public are extremely intolerant of the other in general.