[lb1lf]

-I'll see you and raise by some movie or other with Walther Matthau in it which I saw on the Hallmark Channel a few years ago - in a scene, he asks a kid if he knows Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

The Norwegian subtitle? 'Do you know where in Gettysburg Lincoln lived?'

Oh, and of course, from Star Wars - 'Luke, this is your father's light sabre' was translated as 'Luke, this is your father's lightweight sabre'

[notpachet]

> Star Wars

Putting this here for anyone who needs a laugh:

Star War The Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DI5WyiHQno

(Someone took a copy of Revenge of the Sith that had been translated from English to Chinese and back, and then re-recorded that dialogue and put it back over the original footage.)

[sph]

And here's the entire 2h20 of this mistranslated movie: https://youtu.be/XziLNeFm1ok

(Baader-Meinhof is a funny thing. I have learned of this movie less than 12 hours ago and here it is again)

[CoastalCoder]

Thanks, I just watched a fragment of that video.

I'm amazed by how much more realistic the space fights looked in the first three Star Wars movies compared to the CG stuff.

[jwestbury]

I think it's worth citing the original source for this!

http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west....

It was originally bought from a DVD street vendor in Shanghai. And it's the source of "do not want" as a meme!

[notpachet]

This is brilliant; I didn't know there was a well-known source for this. Thank you!

[OfSanguineFire]

In the Finnish subs for The Royal Tenenbaums DVD, a character who says in English “There’s a dent in the car. There’s one here, too” gets translated as “There’s a dentist in that car. There is a dentist, too.”

A few years after I saw this, I entered the film translation business myself. Generally for anything Hollywood or otherwise big-budget, you can watch a copy of the whole film yourself to understand the context, and you can bill the client for the time spent doing that. Therefore, I tend to suspect that such cases of mistranslation are laziness or a company with an incompetent workflow.

[pantalaimon]

Another classic is a Simpsons episode where Homer shouts „Isotopes rules!“ which in the German dub turned into „Isotopenspielregeln!“ (rules of the game Isotopes)

[actionfromafar]

Very avant-garde. I like it. It must be possible to subtly translate an entire episode like that to make it be about something else entirely.

[OfSanguineFire]

Translations of foreign media that make the story about something else entirely, are a well-established genre. For example, one of Woody Allen’s earliest films.[0] Granted, this wasn’t done “subtly” at all.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Up,_Tiger_Lily%3F

[PeterisP]

I've often seen TV series translations (both as subtitles and as scripts for later dubbing) done by handing over the text to be translated - without any access to the show itself. So the translator has zero context what is on the screen that they're talking about, for things similar to that Star Wars scene, the translator would have no way of telling whether that "light sabre" is bright or lightweight.

[JAlexoid]

I mean... The first one wouldn't be confusing, if it was plainly called Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech.

So a Norwegian interpreter - who has no obligation to know of Lincoln whatsoever - can read it and reasonably interpret it as a request for an address in Gettysburg, for Mr Lincoln.

[OfSanguineFire]

> who has no obligation to know of Lincoln whatsoever

Part of being a decent translator is having a knowledge of the common cultural references of the source-language’s country/countries. Films very frequently generally play on local history or previous films or literature, and you are expected to be able to deal with that.

[lb1lf]

I suspect it was an early attempt at machine translation, or perhaps that the translators are paid so bad there is no incentive to pause even for a moment to evaluate if the translation makes sense in context.

[actionfromafar]

The problem is what you don't know you don't know. If your understanding is lacking, how do you know you're not watching a movie veering into the absurd?

[reaperducer]

The first one wouldn't be confusing, if it was plainly called Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech.

Do you seriously not know that a speech is an "address?"

[tapland]

The translator apparently did not, and it would probably have been fine if it was actually called Speach.

that was the entire point of the comment