Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Fred, Jen, and the American joke
They say that the comedy of one culture doesn’t export well to another, but if you ever try watching an American comedy with the foreign audio or subtitles on, it becomes pretty clear why some countries allegedly dismiss any joke that isn’t funny as an “American joke”.
I’ve recently started revisiting my DVD library in Spanish, just to see the “little differences” à la Pulp Fiction — where, incidentally, “three little Fonzies” is translated “three friends” and “my bad motherfucker” becomes “my funny wallet”. The translations are often pretty insipid, but some things can’t be easily translated, I reasoned.
That is, until I started watching Gilmore Girls.
Now a comedy like Gilmore Girls poses some obvious problems, what with its humor being saturated with verbal flourishes and non-stop pop-cultural references. Still, some verbal flourishes seemed like they could have been translated easily enough, but were Cliff-Noted just the same:
Click to see the video
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LORELAI
Aw, look at you trying to make Mommy feel like you don’t spend every night tunneling out of here with a spoon.
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Which became, in back-translated Spanish:
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LORELAI
Look at you. Trying to make Mommy feel better.
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Why they couldn’t make a more literal translation work here I can’t begin to guess. Not that I got a chance to, because a line later we get:
Click to see the video
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LORELAI
So, guess who’s in the process of breaking up.
RORY
Brad and Jen?
LORELAI
Bite your tongue!
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In the Spanish version, Rory’s guess becomes:
Fred and Jen?!
Even if the Spanish-speaking world is unfamiliar with Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who the hell are Fred and Jen?
And how did they manage to go from “Thus spake [Roger] Ebert” in another episode to “Let’s speak of Ebert”?
It became clear to me then that the translators for the DVD version of a movie or TV show are likely not working from a written version of the script, but are simply guessing from what they can hear — much like people who think that Jimi Hendrix says, “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy” in “Purple Haze”.
Nor do they apparently have any contact with the original writers, as when Lorelai is introduced to a publicist friend (“Maureen”), who confides:
Click to see the video
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MAUREEN
She meant to run all those people down. But you didn’t hear it from me.
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The “she” in this refers to publicist Lizzie Grubman, who infamously yelled “Fuck you, white trash!” and plowed her SUV into a crowd of people outside a nightclub in the Hamptons in 2001.
The Spanish translator apparently had no knowledge of the incident, and interpreted “run down” as “criticize”:
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MAUREEN
She wanted to criticize a few, but I didn’t say it.
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Granted, oblique cultural references like this are only amusing if one knows what they’re referring to, and many of those references were lost even on English speakers. (Hence the “Gilmorisms” booklet included in DVD box sets.) But if the quips and jokes are translated into gibberish, then the whole show ceases to be a comedy/drama and becomes only a drama about two girls who spend an inordinate amount of time chatting and laughing about nothing. In which case, why make Las chicas Gilmore an option at all on the DVD?
Don’t get me wrong — some jokes clearly can’t be translated. That’s the curse on all comedies, not just American ones. But the “American joke” — the one that no one laughs at — is ultimately on the film companies that hire these translators.
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