Is that a fish in your ear?
I'm currently reading Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos, a book about translation and its problems. By a curious coincidence I was reading a section on the constraints of subtitling and then saw an amusing instance of it.
There's a French sitcom running on Sky Arts at the moment called Hard, about a young widow who finds she has inherited a porn company. Her leading actor is referred to throughout in the subtitles as "Roy the Rod". She points out that Roy is not a French name and he explains it's his porn star name - you take the name of your first pet and your mother's maiden name. He had a hamster called Roy and his mother's maiden name was Lapoutre "and La poutre means the rod" he adds. Only listening to the sound track, of course he didn't say that. French people presumably know what the word means (and my dictionary translates it as "beam", the alliteration added by the translator). I think he just emphasises the name.
Incidentally, Bellos then goes onto discuss dubbing, still the preferred method for foreign films in Germany, and mentions an old Jewish practice called "targum". By perhaps as early as the fifth century BC, by which time Aramaic was the everyday language of Palestine, the rabbi would speak Hebrew in the synagogue whilst an interpreter gave a running translation.
Bellos states that this process has been re-invented in eastern Europe, where foreign films are shown not dubbed but with a single voice giving a commentary often with the original language audible underneath. Bellos was born in the UK but is presumably too young to remember those eastern European children's films - of which the best known was probably The Singing Ringing Tree - which were shown on British TV with a single voice speaking English over the original German or Czech or Russian. (And, I suppose, this led to Eric Thomson's famous versions of The Magic Roundabout. A single voice again, but this time not even attempting a translation of the original French.)
There's a French sitcom running on Sky Arts at the moment called Hard, about a young widow who finds she has inherited a porn company. Her leading actor is referred to throughout in the subtitles as "Roy the Rod". She points out that Roy is not a French name and he explains it's his porn star name - you take the name of your first pet and your mother's maiden name. He had a hamster called Roy and his mother's maiden name was Lapoutre "and La poutre means the rod" he adds. Only listening to the sound track, of course he didn't say that. French people presumably know what the word means (and my dictionary translates it as "beam", the alliteration added by the translator). I think he just emphasises the name.
Incidentally, Bellos then goes onto discuss dubbing, still the preferred method for foreign films in Germany, and mentions an old Jewish practice called "targum". By perhaps as early as the fifth century BC, by which time Aramaic was the everyday language of Palestine, the rabbi would speak Hebrew in the synagogue whilst an interpreter gave a running translation.
Bellos states that this process has been re-invented in eastern Europe, where foreign films are shown not dubbed but with a single voice giving a commentary often with the original language audible underneath. Bellos was born in the UK but is presumably too young to remember those eastern European children's films - of which the best known was probably The Singing Ringing Tree - which were shown on British TV with a single voice speaking English over the original German or Czech or Russian. (And, I suppose, this led to Eric Thomson's famous versions of The Magic Roundabout. A single voice again, but this time not even attempting a translation of the original French.)