Not so long ago, my brother and me were watching Shin Chan on [adult swim]. If you don’t know what [adult swim] is, that probably means you either don’t have cable TV or you don’t live in US. Let me explain it then. It is a cable network which shares the same channel with Cartoon Network. At 10pm, cartoons for children end, and [adult swim] block starts. The network specializes in adult themed animation which includes syndicated shows such as Familly Guy, American Dadm Futurama, as well as originals like Seth Green’s Robot Chicken, the excellent Venture Bros cartoon an many others. They also air a lot of anime like Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, Fullmetal Alchemist, Cowboy Bepop, FLCL and etc.
Most of the shows that they air on regular basis are pretty good. They either are really funny and quotable, or damn good anime. They do experiment a lot though and I believe this is why they got Shin Chan. I’m not really a huge fan of that show, but I’ve seen worse. That’s besides the point though. As we were watching it, my brother commented on how weird it was that this Japanese cartoon was full of American pop culture references. He was right, the show made references to Britney’s meltdowns, popular reality TV shows and made jabs at more or less popular Hollywood actors.
“It’s Almost as if it was specifically targeted at the US audiences,” he mused.
That’s because it was.
You see, wacky comedy shows such as Shin Chan or FLCL cannot be merely translated into English. If you would do a simple direct translation, you would end up with a thick, incomprehensible soup of Japanese cultural references. Things such as various puns, word play, sexual nuances and language specific idioms do not translate well. Trust me, they don’t. Take any two languages, and you will end up with a lot of popular turns of phrase that make absolutely no sense. A good example here, is “the bees knees”. If you think about it, It doesn’t even make much sense in english. How do you translate it, so that will fit within the time frame, match the lip flops and convey the same idea? It’s difficult!
It’s even worse with pop culture references, especially if the source and target cultures are so different. This is especially evident for Japan which doesn’t share our common western cultural heritage. They have their own fairy tales, their own folk heroes, different proverbs and distinct traditions. There is a huge cultural gap there. This makes referential humor, funny allusions, nuances, puns and verbal jokes very culture specific. Slapstic, physical and situational humor tends to be universal, but anything subtler may often be impossible to grasp for an outsiders without the propper cultural background.
In literature (and graphic novels) you can always use footnotes to explain away the tricky jokes and references. For example, when I was growing up in Poland I used to read Spider Man comics which tended to be heavily annotated. The footnotes explained continuity problems, references to other events in Marvel universe that were not published in Poland, and often added little bits among the lines “in USA it is common to blah blah blah”. I’ve also seen similar things done in Manga – where a footnote will explain a joke or allusion to you by providing the necessary background information. This preserves the original intention, but likely looses on spontaneity. If someone needs to explain the joke to you, it is usually less funny. But, at least you get the gist of the author’s original intention which is good.
Unfortunately you can’t do that in animation. You just can’t stop the action to explain something to the viewer. So what do you do? You replace the jokes with equivalent or similar ones that will be easily grasped by your target audience. Yup, you go and change the meaning, tone and intention of the original hoping to preserve the funny, and try not to introduce inconsistencies to the story.
This is a very difficult task as you may imagine. A lot of jokes get completely lost in translation, and must be rewritten from scratch. Thus the dubbed episode of Shin Chan or FLCL may end up being quite different from the original. Sad part is that translators are usually not humorists (and vice versa), so the quality of jokes you get in the dubbed version may vary. You can take a show that was pure gold in original, and turn it into a below average comedy where jokes are hit-or-miss.
I believe that this is why so few Japanese comedy shows get rabid fan following here in US. They are just damn hard to localize well. More action/plot oriented shows such as Ghost in the Shell or Evangelion on the other hand do very well here, because they have less referential, culture specific contents.
It’s like this: forced attempts at humor made by localization teams usually can’t compete with American shows made by real virtuosos of obscure pop culture references and cultural in-jokes. They are out of their league. So shows like Shin Chan end up being only moderately funny and moderately popular. Especially if they are juxtaposed against Family Guy, Robot Chicken or South Park.
Still, next time you are watching a foreign comedy and it throws surprisingly relevant pop culture references at you, you should keep in mind these were not in the original. They were written by the translator(s). So if you found them funny, check the credits for who did the localization and give him some props. As a bilingual person, I can attest that their job is incredibly difficult. I often grasp at straws to translate simple idioms between two languages deeply rooted in western culture.
Seriously – I think that the worst thing that can happen to you as a translator, is when the two people your are mediating between decide to get clever, and they start throwing puns, and word jokes at each other – in their own respective languages of course. If that happens you either try to explain the jokes in context, or try to steer the conversation in another direction. And if you choose the former, it quickly becomes awkward. Someone throws a one-liner pun, and then you go into a 15 minute long conversation with the other guy trying to explain to him why it was funny.
Anyway, people who do these localizations for Japanese shows have it even worse. They have to reach across great cultural divides. The fact that they can still come up with something that makes sense, and works within the context is nothing short of amazing.
Man, I wished we Danes had something like AdultSwim. Sometimes, you can get lucky and see some anime, tough they crop up rarely. We just got to see Naruto on the telly tough, and I guess more will pop up in the coming years.
But they were faithful to the original anime. Every sunday morning, the american child version would air, dubbed with danish. However, older audiences got to see the original japanese version every thursday night :)
@Jakob: I believe that Naruto is show on Cartoon Network during the day here, in fully Bowlderized format where they edit out all the blood, and replace sharp objects with chopsticks and hamburgers and whatnot. Or something like that.
I think I watched an episode or two back in the day, but it was a bit boring. So I never got into it. Especially since [adult-swim] was airing stuff like GiTS, FMA, Evangelion, Bleach, Death Note and many others without censorship.
this is a very interesting topic. Some 15 years ago I stopped reading the german translations of Terry Pratchett because they lack so much of what makes Pterry unique, and thanks to amazon I can conveniently order the original english books. And I even get them earlier since the translations usually lag a year or so.
On the other hand I’m impressed by the german translation of M*A*S*H. I recently bought most of the DVD releases and my wife doesn’t like to watch it in english language, so I switch on english subtitles when we watch it together. The translation is really good, and as you noticed, it replaced puns and references with german ones, but the translator(s) could keep 99% of the meaning. That’s quite impressive and far beyond my capabilities (I sometimes try to translate pieces of Pterry to my wife when I find something especially funny or thoughtful).
Another example that comes to my mind is a british TV series that was quite unsuccessful in english language but was rated very high in Germany due to the translator changing nearly all of the dialogues to be funny instead of serious (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persuaders!).Wikipedia calls this “radical dubbing”.
In Belgium, tv stations don’t dub movies or tv-shows from other countries / languages.
So when you’re watching, you can have the convenience of being able to follow the show with the subtitles.
And when you speak the original language of the show, the finer language humour is still preserved.
Subtitles don’t bother me or most of the Belgians (anymore), because we even subtitle our own tv programs. Reasons for this is that some are in a dialect which is not comprehensible for people who speak another dialect (Belgium, and more Flanders, has a lot! of dialects).
An interesting example is the magic roundabout (wikipedia) which I don’t think ever made it to the states.
This was a French animation, and when it was picked up by the BBC it was redubbed with completely different stories. The original scripts were not looked at whatsoever and the stories and characters were entirely based on the animation.
The English version became one of the most popular shows of its day and continues to be an immense cult classic.