Back in 2014 we talked about Translating Frozen Into Arabic, but that’s just one tiny tile in the impressive mosaic that is Rhaomi’s MetaFilter post:
Unlike many cinematic exports, the Disney canon of films distinguishes itself with an impressive dedication to dubbing. Through an in-house service called Disney Character Voices International, not just dialogue but songs, too, are skillfully re-recorded, echoing the voice acting, rhythm, and rhyme scheme of the original work to an uncanny degree (while still leaving plenty of room for lyrical reinvention). The breadth of the effort is surprising, as well — everything from Arabic to Icelandic to Zulu gets its own dub, and their latest project, Encanto, debuted in more than forty tongues (can you even name that many?). Luckily for polyglots everywhere, the exhaustiveness of Disney’s translations is thoroughly documented online in multilanguage mixes and one-line comparisons, linguistic kaleidoscopes that cast new light on old standards.
There are a bunch of links there (and he provides quite a few examples that I didn’t quote), but the only one I’ve linked here is the name-the-language quiz, which I did annoyingly badly on (37/47). Some of it is my fault (I couldn’t come up with some obvious-in-retrospect language names under time pressure), but some of it is theirs (to spare others my suffering, they call it “Mandarin,” not anything involving “Chinese”). You don’t have to put the cursor anywhere on the quiz, just type a language name into the box and if it’s correct the name will appear next to the appropriate translation. Fun, as is the whole post (unfond though I am of Disney movies).
SPOILERS
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I too, got a mere 37, though for some reason I unaccountably didn’t type “Russian”, and I stupidly didn’t think of trying “Castilian” for the other Spanish, or “Cantonese” despite your tipoff.
However, the notable absence of Welsh and Kusaal renders the entire exercise politically suspect.
Yeah, “Castilian” escaped me too. Bad design. But I am comforted that I am not the only knowledgeable person who finished out of the running.
a friend of mine once asked my opinion about possibly using translation of songs from a Disney film as a material for learning Russian. I listened. I cringed. That was totally disastrous. I did not know before that anyone would ever translate such songs (everyone listens to them untranslated…), but it was not simply bad. It was impossible to make it good: the tune was stongly adapted to English language and the ugliness was enforced by the rhythm and intonation of English. Yet I did not want to discourage my friend. And then she saved me: “you know, it was a terrible idea. I just listened to the Arabic version [apparently she never listened to it before] and if it is the same….”. “yeah, the same:(”
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PhoneticFanatic from another thread said that modern Russian pop sucks for the same reason. Likely he is right.
Most of Disney is targeted at kids too young to follow subtitles, at least that’s what movie distributors think, so even here it’s all dubbed / rerecorded including the big musical numbers. (Stuff targeted at adults is subtitled here). I assume Disney supplies the orchestral tracks, though. There was a venerable tradition of translating US and UK top twenty hits to Danish, too. Elvis and The Beatles were the beginning of the end of that, people didn’t want Danish versions of their hits, but it lives on in kids’ movie dubs.
(Disney musical numbers often use very good performers in the original version — sometimes the Danish dub has a “big name” voice actor and a stand-in for the songs. I just listened to “When You Wish upon A Star” and the Danish version, and even the stand-in had to cheat on the high ending notes that Cliff Edwards aced).
I have from informed sources that, unlike the major movies, the Disney TV series Phineas & Ferb has very well translated songs, at least in Norwegian. My son and daughter* say it’s because Disney realised that Phineas & Ferb is actually good, and when they think that’s part of the reason for the success, they just can’t take any chances.
* Oh, I revealed my sources. Sorry!
I missed three and got 41 out of 47. If you type “Foo” and it marks both “Xian Foo” and “Yian Foo” you only score one point.
@mollymolly, I redid the quiz, and it appeared to give two points in the cases you mention; however, there are also three blank spaces (currently) at the end of the quiz, so it doesn’t look like you can get full credit ever.
My first pass through I missed the two eight-letter titles which I was pleased to recognize as necessarily related languages, but which I couldn’t put my finger on despite knowing where they fit alphabetically. Another minute, I’d have had them.
it appeared to give two points in the cases you mention
Yes.
there are also three blank spaces (currently) at the end of the quiz, so it doesn’t look like you can get full credit ever.
Good lord, I didn’t even notice that. Bad design! But armed with that knowledge — that the maximum score is 44, not 47 — and with the memory of things I missed, I retook it, and got 43; the one I missed turned out to be one where I tried a different version of the language name than they used. Sheesh.
My first pass through I missed the two eight-letter titles which I was pleased to recognize as necessarily related languages, but which I couldn’t put my finger on despite knowing where they fit alphabetically.
Those were the next-to-last I found, I think; I figured out one after going through alphabetical possibilities, and then guessed the other as a plausible related one in the right spot. The last I found was in fact Castliian, which was honestly a shot in the dark because it was clearly some Romance dialect and the alphabetical window was very narrow but I didn’t think it would be that.
However, the notable absence of Welsh and Kusaal renders the entire exercise politically suspect.
I’ve read somewhere that there were only two African languages that Disney films had been translated into so far, and one of them was Egyptian Arabic, which hardly even qualified as African. (The other was Zulu, a special issue for Lion King only.)
The absence of Welsh (and for that matter Irish) does seem weird though.
A few kids’ movies have had Irish dubs broadcast on TG4, but the 2015 Spongebob movie is the only one I can think of that got an Irish-language cinema release. (It’s also on Netflix. None of the names are translated, not even Patrick.)
the 2015 Spongebob movie
I was thinking “that can’t be right, my daughter was in preschool*) when we watched that”, but the internet tells me there were sequels to the 2004 one…
In order not to confuse anyone, preschool is not really a thing in Germany – that was in Lebanon, which also meant that we watched the film in English with French subtitles (or was it the other way round? My memories have faded.)
@Han: Was that the one with Hasselhoff?
Yep, the Hoff was in it.