this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Swedish translators have largely stopped translating titles as the population nowadays are essentially all competent enough English speakers. But back in the day, there were some... let's say questionable choices. Sadly many of them are based on word play and translate poorly back to English. Superman III was translated into an absolutely atrocious Kryptonite pun, for example. I wish I could do it justice.
It Could Happen To You being translated as Cop gives waitress a $2 million tip is one of my other favourites - just a mundane summary of the plot with zero zest or punch.
It was also decided for some reason to name the entire Mel Brooks catalogue as Springtime for X after The Producers was first translated as Springtime for Hitler (which at least makes sense - that is part of the movie!). I think the worst offender is Springtime for the History of the World part 1 (History of the World part 1) - but they're all bad.
There was also a trend for a while to randomly add sub-titles to movies - such as Crocodile Dundee: a big game hunter in New York.
Finally, it amused me greatly that The Sound of Music was translated as Sound of Music - still in English, just dropping the article.
I have a friend who is Swedish, and my all time favorite isn't a movie, but a comic book. Batman translated into Läderlappen. So after some discussion about that period in time and how things were being translated I asked, well then what did Robin translate to, and he looked at me and said "Robin". I almost fell out of my chair. So he brought me a copy of Läderlappen and Robin. I love it.
That's so funny. I just though Läderlappen just sounds like german for "leather rag" and google does in fact translates it to "The Leather patch".
I wonder what their thought process was in coming up with leather patch for batman.
I am not sure, but to tie this all back together, the whole conversation came up when we were talking about how, when you kill a bat in Valheim it drops leather.
So "läderlapp" is an old Swedish slang or colloquialism for bat. Back in the 50s when Batman was first brought to Sweden English literacy was a lot worse than it is now, and translating titles and names were much more common. A direct translation of Batman would be "fladdermusmannen" - which is a very unwieldy name - so they settled for a then-more-common slang for "the bat". It does sound a little better, though it would have been best to just do what finally happened from the 80s and let Batman remain untranslated.
Läderlappen would be a great term for Harley riders.
Oh yeah the whole of Mel Brooks are being translated as "La folle histoire de..." (The crazy story of...) Because I guess the first one was Mel Brooks History of the world (the words for history and story are the same in french)
Which reminds me that Die Hard was translated as "Piège de Crystal" (Crystal Trap) which isn't per se a bad title, but then every movie that had a hero against people taking something over became "Piège ..." Literally dozens of Piège movie that have nothing to do with Die Hard
That's so funny, Sweden had a similar thing going with Goldie Hawn movies! After The Girl From Petrovka was translated literally ("Tjejen från Petrovka"), the next 8 out of 11 Goldie Hawn movies had their titles changed and translated as "Tjejen som..."(The girl who...) despite having nothing else in common apart from being comedies.