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Humor and meaning lost in translation?

GrooseIsLoose

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Aug 16, 2019
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It’s just possible her jokes didn’t localise well or work for a Western audience. I’d be keen to know how she is perceived in other countries’ localisations. And in the original Japanese.
What @Mamono101 said in this post got me thinking and I also rembered TheAnimeMan talk about this. In a video, he talked about Light Novels especially Bakemonogatari and said that many things are lost when translating from Japanese to other languages like for eg wordplays with kanji etc.

One such egg sample I could think of is Shin Chan. I realized how much I missed when I watched the original after watching the dub.

Thought of starting this in Anime section but then realized it's a universal phenomenon. Have you watched or read something similar
 

Jimmu

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I’ve noticed this happen quite a few times where subtitles are not able to quite capture the proper nuance behind things said and convey it properly to the reader.

One example that comes to mind is from the movie “A Silent Voice”. It’s a great movie that I highly recommend by the way so in case you haven’t seen it yet and plan to I’ll spoiler the below.

In the movie there is a scene where a Deaf girl is trying to confess her feelings to the male protagonist. Her speech is difficult to make out so when she says “I like you” (suki) in Japanese the male hears it as “tsuki” (moon) which is obviously a huge misunderstanding but easy to make as tsuki and suki are pretty close together in terms of sound.

After watching this and feeling that the English subtitles didn’t really explain this very well to people who didn’t understand any Japanese I was curious about how they would cover this in the English dub and saw that they tried their best to make her saying “I love you” sound something like “moon” but it really isn’t pulled off very well. To be fair to them this would be a very difficult scene to bring into English any other way without completely losing the meaning

Understanding and being able to use a language is one thing but being able to translate it is a whole other level - like an art form. I’ve huge respect for people who can do it well.
 

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