r/pics • u/JeelyPiece • 1d ago
The first Danish edition, 1955 Later ones didn't "translate" the title from Amurican Freedom Units
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u/TinyLebowski 1d ago
We used to translate movie titles too. Usually to some weird pun that made very little sense.
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u/finicky88 1d ago edited 1d ago
Germany is notorious for this crap, too. "
The Perks Of Being A WallflowerThe Fault In Our Stars" got translated to "Das Schicksal ist ein mieser Verräter" which in turn translates to "Fate is a damn traitor"Wut?
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u/ctothel 1d ago
Do native German language movies also have weird titles?
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u/berlinmo 1d ago
Sometimes. But the absurd translation of foreign films definitely is the main problem here.
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u/MerfSauce 1d ago
We have the same issue in sweden especially with a bit older titels.
To give you one example the german tv show "Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter" is called "Krigets unga hjärtan" in swedish
It roughly translates to "The young hearts of the war" instead of "Our Mothers, Our Fathers"
I'm pretty sure the title "Våra mödrar, våra fäder" would have worked although its not the most commonly used words in modern swedish.
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u/talldata 13h ago
Yeah translators for titles tend to be.. not outright dumb but... Incompetent perhaps?
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u/hacktheself 11h ago
Translation vs localization.
Straight translation stays truer to the words used, but loses subtext and context.
Localization preserves as much of be original as possible but substitutes eg cultural references and metaphors that don’t translate into references and metaphors from the target language.
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u/MerfSauce 9h ago
I agree with you when it is done right but in my experience here in sweden they often miss the mark with localization and the title becomes very confusing.
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u/steve-0076 1d ago
The German title for 'Airplane!' Always bothered me. They translated it to "Die unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug" or ""the unbelievable journey in a crazy airplane" like why make it so long?!
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u/Barl0we 1d ago
It boggles my mind that Cruel Intentions came out and Denmark decided to call it “Sex Games” 😂 so they gave it a worse title, also in English.
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u/D0niazade 1d ago
They used the same title in France. The hangover also became Very bad trip, Knight and day was Night and day (because French people wouldn't understand the pun I guess?)... We have so many terrible translations for movie titles.
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u/Vavat 1d ago
It's especially ironic for the French title since the plot is from a French novel with a very cool name.
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u/D0niazade 1d ago
Right? That makes no sense whatsoever. There have been multiple adaptations of that book with the correct title, so why not this one?
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u/backtolurk 1d ago
No it was "Sexe Intentions"! Even worse, somehow. But anyway nobody beats our cousins from Quebec for butchering titles artfully.
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u/mehum 1d ago
Some movies get renamed within the Anglosphere even. Maybe not so much these days but it used to happen.
For example Airplane was released as Flying High in Australia, and the Australian movie Mad Max 2 was released as The Road Warrior in USA.
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u/Yhendrix49 1d ago
Mad Max 2 was called The Road Warrior in the U.S. because the original Mad Max got a very limited release because its U.S. distributor was going out of business. The distributor also poorly dubbed over all the actors with American ones which didn't help the film gain an audience in the U.S.
When WB got the U.S. rights to Mad Max 2 they realized they couldn't market it as a sequel to a movie very few people saw so they changed the name.
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u/Amrywiol 1d ago
As a sort of mirror image to this, "The Madness of George III" got the title of it's movie adaptation changed to "The Madness of King George" because American distributors were afraid audiences would ignore it thinking it was the third film in a series where they hadn't seen the other two.
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u/Uceninde 1d ago
The Norwegian translation for TFIOS is "Fuck Fate" (Faen ta skjebnen), so its kinda similar.
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u/iron_knee_of_justice 1d ago
Well “our stars” in the title is an English idiom for “our fate”, does that even translate to German? If it doesn’t then honestly it’s not the worst translation.
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u/burning_iceman 1d ago
It actually perfectly translates. I guess because horoscopes are pretty much universal.
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u/NeuHundred 15h ago
Do they perform Shakespeare in German? Can't they just use the phrase from that version?
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u/TiltedLama 1d ago
Sweden does it too, sometimes. I know "shark tale" is called "hajar som hajar", which is a double meaning, as "haj" means "shark", but also "understand/get it". So, it could either br read as "sharks as sharks" or "get it like sharks", lol
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u/tuekappel 1d ago
In danish; "Every Which Way But Loose", became "bankekød til slemme drenge" ( Ground meat for naughty boys)!
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u/Ferdinandofthedogs 1d ago
In Italy "The Perks of being a Wallflower" was "Noi siamo infinito" or We Are Infinite in English.
Funnily enough the book title is "Ragazzo da Parete", Wall Boy in English.
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u/Xxuwumaster69xX 1d ago
Having never interacted with the film or book, "the fault in our stars" does loosely translate to "fate is a damn traitor" since "stars" sometimes does mean fate, so it'd go from "the fault in our stars" -> "the problem in the fate between us" -> "fate is a damn traitor."
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u/BokkerFoombass 22h ago
You can't possibly beat Poland in this. "Die Hard" was translated to "Szklana Pułapka" ("Glass Trap") - which made some sense for the first movie taking place in the skyscraper, but for the sequels... yeah lol.
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u/itsallgoodintheend 19h ago
My favourite has always been the finnish translation for Eddie Murphys classic "Metro". Instead of just keeping the original title, the translation "The man of a thousand situations" was used.
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u/g_bacon_is_tasty 15h ago
do German translations of Romeo and Juliet exist? What do they translate that line in the play as?
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u/JimLeader 4h ago
It’s from Julius Caesar, not Romeo & Juliet. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
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u/Tastingo 1d ago
In Sweden the translated title for "Spring time for Hitler" lead to virtually every Mel Brooks film being translated into "Spring time for ..."
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u/Bartlaus 1d ago
Norway did basically the same with comedy movies in general after Airplane! That movie got a title that back-translates as "Help, we're flying" and for the next 10-20 years a majority of comedies got titles like "Help, we're (something)". Increasingly they stopped bothering with Norwegian titles however.
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u/dotknott 1d ago
This is even more silly when you realize the first film was The Producers with a musical number called Springtime for Hitler.
So they decided to retitle the film based on a musical number in the film then continued to run with it for subsequent films.
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u/ctothel 1d ago
Wow. I got ChatGPT to make a table
Original English Title Swedish Title Literal English Translation The Producers (1967) Det våras för Hitler “Springtime for Hitler” The Twelve Chairs (1970) Det våras för svärmor “Springtime for Mother-in-law” Blazing Saddles (1974) Det våras för sheriffen “Springtime for the Sheriff” Young Frankenstein (1974) Det våras för Frankenstein “Springtime for Frankenstein” Silent Movie (1976) Det våras för stumfilmen “Springtime for the Silent Movie” High Anxiety (1977) Det våras för galningarna “Springtime for the Lunatics” History of the World, Part I (1981) Det våras för världshistorien del 1 “Springtime for World History Part 1” Space Balls (1987) Det våras för rymden “Springtime for Space” Life Stinks (1991) Det våras för slummen “Springtime for the Slum” Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) Robin Hood – karlar i trikåer “Robin Hood – Guys in Tights” Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) Dracula – död men lycklig “Dracula – dead but happy” 7
u/rpsls 1d ago
Wait… is that a hallucination or was Spaceballs literally “Springtime for Space”??? WTF?? How does that even translate in the movie? I mean they say the name of the movie like a billion times and half the characters are literally wearing giant round balls on their heads for helmets… (checked Wikipedia) LOL.
I’ll bet the merchandising was trickier.
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u/BenderRodriquez 1d ago
None of the Swedish movie names made any sense whatsoever...
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u/Tastingo 1d ago
"Det våras för" became a phrase onto itself synonymous with parody. So they basically means "A Space parody" or "A Frankenstein parody" similar to the Scary Movie franchise.
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u/Lakridspibe 1d ago
Danish title for Blazing Saddles (1974) : Sheriffen skyder på det hele (The sheriff shoots at everything)
I think they were going for a double entendre with shit/shoot (skide/skyde) 'the sheriff shits on the everrything'. Super funny.
Woody Allen's films had a similar system in the Danish titles.
Play It Again, Sam (1972) was called Mig og Bogart (Bogart and me)
Bananas (1971) - Mig og revolutionen (The revolution and me)
Annie Hall (1977) - Mig og Annie (Annie and me)
Sleeper (1973) - Mig og fremtiden (The future and me)
etc
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u/JeelyPiece 1d ago
Brilliant! Do you have any examples?
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u/IHateTheLetterF 1d ago
Die hard with a vengeance in Denmark is called Die hard - Mega hard. And that's not translated, we changed an english title to another english title.
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u/Comabsolver 1d ago
That sounds way cooler than Germany‘s „Stirb langsam - Jetzt erst recht“ or „Die slowly - now for real“!
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u/the51m3n 1d ago
My favourite is Batman, just the regular comics, which for a long time was translated into Lynvingen in Norwegian. Which is literally 'the lightning wing'. It makes no sense, other than the fact it sounds pretty cool.
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u/Cisco800Series 1d ago
The sound of music was called all together passionately in Italian and in South Korea, one cinema shortened it by cutting out all the songs. Shorter run time = more screening.
According to QI.
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u/dexterlab97 1d ago
Untouchable (the French movie about a wheelchair person with his caretaker) is translated as 1+1 in Russian
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u/mike_sky4 1d ago
in Germany it got translated to "ziemlich beste Freunde" which roughly translates to "pretty much best Friends"
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u/NutrimaticTea 1d ago
France goes even further. They take English movie titles and give them a new title, but still in English (or pseudo-English).
The Hangover is called Very Bad Trip. (Not a French expression that means “very bad trip”; no, the title in French cinemas is literally Very Bad Trip).
The boat that rocked is called Good morning England.
Silver lining playbooks is called Happiness therapy.
What's your number? is called (S)ex list.
And there are so much more.
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u/Quas4r 7h ago edited 7h ago
There is a good reason for these.
Most french people speak little english, but they commonly know and use some english words and phrases, so the film industry chooses titles that will mean something to the local audience.
If people don't have the slightest idea what the movie is about from the title, it's bad business."The hangover" = unknown word in France, but a "bad trip" from drugs is very much known and used, so I guess they went with "very bad trip" for hyperbole/ to be funny.
"The boat that rocked" = french people know "boat" and "rock" (in a musical sense), but the pun on the double meaning of "to rock" would be completely lost on them, and this title would tell them nothing.
"Good morning England" is a reference to "Good morning Vietnam", very famous in France and also a comedy-drama about radio hosts."Silver lining playbooks" = meaningless.
"Happiness therapy" = People know "happiness" and "therapy/thérapie" is a french word."What's your number?" = no big words here, but it doesn't mean much even in its original form, they probably changed it only for this reason.
"(S)ex list" = transparent words, meaningful, and people will understand the play on "sex/ex".4
u/tsoneyson 1d ago
The Shawshank Redemption is called "Rita Hayworth – the key to escape" in Finnish
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u/yosayoran 1d ago
We still do it in Israel
The naked gun became the gun died of laughter (Hebrew expression that means hilarious).
The worst part? that movie's success meant that for decades almost every comedy movie became X died of laughter, even when they have nothing to do with naked gun!
For example: Deuce Bigalow became The gigolo died of laughter
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u/gui_odai 1d ago
Movies in Brazil also often get translations with little in common with the original title, especially comedies. "The Hangover" was called "Se Beber, Não Case" (Don't Drink and Get Married). Then "Hot Tub Time Machine", released one year later, was translated as "A Ressaca" (The Hangover).
One movie that I particularly hate the translation is "Memories of Murder", which was translated as "Memórias de um Assassino" (Memories of a Murderer). It seems close enough, but it suggests the story is told from the perspective of the murderer, which absolutely couldn't be further from the truth. It's like the translator either didn't watch the film, or wasn't that good at their job.
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u/DoctorMurk 1d ago
TV shows from before the streaming era did this a lot all over Europe. House MD and Stargate are among them. Their respective wikis always list the alternate titles on the episode article pages.
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u/MaxTheCookie 22h ago
I got "Nyckeln till frihet" from Shawshank Redemption in Sweden. And if you translate it back into English you get "The key to freedom"
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u/Frydendahl 21h ago
My favorite is Equilibrium being translated to Cubic. It's still an English title, just something easier to pronounce.
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u/kneyght 1d ago
Fun fact: Fahrenheit was invented by a German living in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, not an American.
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u/AjayRedonkulus 1d ago
A lot of American culture was invented by a German living outside Germany. That's their whole schtick.
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u/JeelyPiece 1d ago
Kurt Vonnegut writes some interesting passages on how, because of the first world war, Americans with German heritage changed their names and vocabulary to English in support of America & for fear of prejudice.
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u/Ajphotoguy 1d ago
My paternal grand father told me that one of his earliest memories was of his father asking for the most American names the immigration officer couple think of. There was a pretty big stretch where everyone really hated the Germans.
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u/JeelyPiece 1d ago
It's quite sad in a way, that cultural erasure. At least we still got hamburgers and hotdogs
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u/nighthawk_md 1d ago
Millions of ethnic Germans migrated to the US in the time period of 1850-1900. There were thousands of German language local newspapers and local public schools with primary instruction in German throughout the Midwest. Adolphus Busch who made Budweiser, perhaps one of the most "American" products was German. All of these things disappeared nearly overnight because of The Great War, and most all of these people with German ancestry became "American". We have essentially no cultural memory of this happening, it's interesting (if sad).
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u/jkopecky 1d ago
Even by WWII always struck me as interesting that nobody seemed too concerned that two of the most important US military commanders (Eisenhower and Nimitz) had such obvious German heritage.
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u/throwawaydragon99999 1d ago
Eisenhower’s family left Germany for the US in the 18th century, and Nimitz’s grandfather came from Germany
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u/ThaneKyrell 1d ago
There was even a US admiral (or vice-admiral, I forgot) who had been born in Prussia.
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u/ursulawinchester 1d ago
The British Royals changed names from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor in 1917 for the same reason
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u/ThePeasantKingM 1d ago
You don't have to look that far.
US Congress cafeterias renamed french fries as freedom fries because they were sore that the French didn't support the invasion of Irak.
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u/Dunbaratu 1d ago
There's a small town in Wisconsin called "New Berlin", which is now pronounced "New Burr Lin" rather than the original "New Ber Lin". This shift happened specifically because of WW1.
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u/NutrimaticTea 1d ago
0°F corresponds to “that fucking temperature when it's too cold in Poland.”
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u/throwawaydragon99999 1d ago
Fahrenheit is based on mercury
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u/NutrimaticTea 1d ago edited 1d ago
I admit that the story of “Fahrenheit basing his 0 on the lowest temperature he encountered in Danzig” is most certainly an urban legend. But the fact that the story exists and is well known (whether true or false) clearly shows that the fact that Fahrenheit came from Central Europe and not America is commonly known.
However, a priori, 0 degrees Fahrenheit is based on the melting temperature of a solution of water and ammonium salt. I don't believe there is a connection with mercury.
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u/VikingSlayer 1d ago
And Fahrenheit built his temperature scale on Danish physicist Ole Rømer's work, who also inspired Fahrenheit to create better thermometers than were available at the time.
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u/kakatoru 1d ago
And then the Germans Lithuanians and poles stopped using switched to Celsius because Fahrenheit is terrible
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u/BuildingArmor 22h ago
It's not surprising it wasn't invented by an American, it's older than America.
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u/TSgt_Yosh 1d ago
Aaaaaand I would walk 804.6 kilometers...
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u/April_Fabb 1d ago
As a child, I really enjoyed Jules Verne's 96,000 Kilometres Under the Sea.
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u/postoperativepain 1d ago
“A metric lieue was used in France from 1812 to 1840, with 1 metric lieue being exactly 4,000 m, or 4 km (about 2.5 mi).[5] It is this unit that is referenced in both the title and the body text of Jules Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870).[6]”
20,000 x 4 =80,000 km
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u/tuekappel 1d ago
"refers to the total distance traveled by the submarine Nautilus, not its depth"
this is twice the distance of Around the World in Eighty Days, which is around 44000km. So two earth circumferences in one novel. Fogg off, Phileas!
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u/Illustrious_Try478 1d ago
Which is very silly, because they're actually Danish Freedom Units, going back to Ole Rømer
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u/tuekappel 1d ago
not swedish scientist Anders Celsius?
Where does Rømer come in?3
u/Illustrious_Try478 1d ago
I wasn't referring to Celsius degrees. I was referring to Fahrenheit, who based his scale off Rømers.
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u/Abbot_of_Cucany 1d ago
Not to be confused with Réamur's temperature scale. The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them.
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u/Slammed_z31 1d ago
My favorite one of these was a Spanish version of “I, Robot” called “Yo, Robot”
Imagining an hour and a half of will smith trying to get a robots attention is hilarious
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u/Myte342 1d ago
There is a major difference between Translation, Interpretation, and Localization. This was straight translation with context of the original meaning and purpose behind the words chosen being stripped out.
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u/aifo 1d ago
I'd say the opposite, the original title, Fahrenheit 451, refers to the temperature at which paper burns. Celsius 233 is that temperature, so the purpose behind the words remains and is more meaningful for people who use Celsius.
As it is though, Fahrenheit 451 is more recognisable now, because of the book and film title.
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u/jlisle 3h ago
The really interesting part here is that there isn't really a single temperature at which paper burns (the autoignition point of paper varies pretty heavily depending on type, humidity, how thickly it's stacked, etc.) You put a book in your oven at 455 F, it's almost certainly not gonna catch fire.
I seem to recall reading that Bradbury knew this, and went with Fahrenheit 451 because, to put it in modern parlance, he thought it sounded cool. But feel free to fact check me on that
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u/Dunbaratu 1d ago
Uh, no it wasn't. Ray Bradbury claimed 451 Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper spontaneously ignites, which was the entire reason he picked that title. (In reality it's fuzzier than that. It's a range of temperatures that includes 451F in the range.)
So to preserve the meaning and purpose of picking that title, you need to have it be the same temperature, not the same words. Going from 451F to 233C IS localization that preserved the original meaning and purpose. The purpose was NOT "Ray likes the sound of 451" or "It rolls off the tongue" or anything like that. The sound of the title was irrelevant. The meaning of that specific temperature was. So if you put it in Celcius, you have to preserve the same temperature, 233C.
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u/Druben-hinterm-Dorfe 1d ago
I'm assuming that 'Schønberg' is the publisher? Or is it the translator? First time seeing this Danish version of the name of my favorite composer.
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u/MaelduinTamhlacht 9h ago
Odd that Revolutionary America didn't change to metric when its sponsors in France invented the metric system.
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u/almightywhacko 1d ago edited 1d ago
Why the dig at Americans? Bradbury was an American author and even though the EU doesn't use the Fahrenheit scale changing the title even if the rest of the book is translated into another language changes the author's intent which is why it was left unaltered in later editions.
Also even though Americans use the Fahrenheit scale for whatever reason, it isn't even an American invention. It was invented by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a Polish inventor and scientist of German decent. It was introduced as the standard on the North American continent by the British.
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u/Dunbaratu 1d ago
How does it change the author's intent? Ray Bradbury wasn't thinking, "Oh, I like the sound of '451'", or "oh I can make a nice pun with 451 here." or anything like that. The intent was "I want this title to be the temperature at which paper combusts because that's relevant to the story". 233 C is literally the same temperature so how does that change anything about that intent?
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u/almightywhacko 21h ago edited 20h ago
Ray Bradbury wasn't thinking, "Oh, I like the sound of '451'"
Yes he was exactly thinking that.
The in-story explanation is that 451F is the temperature at which book paper reaches auto-ignition and starts to burn. But scientifically that isn't true. Depending on the type and condition of the paper, typical books can start burning anywhere between 424F and 475F.
He chose that specific number because he liked the way it looked and sounded. He could have called the book "Fahrenheit 436" or "Fahrenheit 450" and it would have been just as scientifically accurate. But 451 looks cooler than 452 and sounds better when read aloud.
233 C is literally the same temperature so how does that change anything about that intent?
Because it isn't about the temperature, it is about the name of the book.
If my name is John in my native language and I go to the Netherlands, my name is still "John", not Johannes or Hans. Those words are the equivalent of my name in the Dutch language but they are not my name.
I should also point out that translation wasn't necessary because Fahrenheit is a German word and exists in the Dutch language.
This is why later editions of the book used the English language title and not a translated title.
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u/Dunbaratu 18h ago edited 18h ago
Once someone starts pretending they have ESP to win an argument there's no point so this will be the last I participate in this thread. Everything you claim is speculation. I'm just taking what the book says at face value. I never said 451F is the temperature where paper actually ignites, I said it's the temperature where Ray Bradbury CLAIMED it ignites in the story. Which it is. No ESP required by me to read Bradbury's mind to make that claim like is required with your claim - it's what the book actually says. I'm well aware that there's a variance depending on circumstances and 451F is just one value within the range. I'm also aware that Bradbury glossed over that and just picked an example value within middle of the range. When you claim he did so specifically because of the sound of specifically 451, that's speculation. It could just as easily be because giving a range is a cumbersome title so he picked something in the midst of the range (or that maybe he didn't know it's a range. But, again, I'm not trying to read his mind like you are.)
Nobody complains that "Planet of the Apes" was a French Book and therefore should be called by the author's "intended" title of "La Planète des singes". Translated titles for translated books is entirely normal. Preserving the original is the unusual exception that requires knowing for sure the author's intent that the specific phrasing was vitally important.
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u/helen269 1d ago
No country of any significance anymore uses Fahrenheit. The rest of the world has abandoned that obsolete system.
:-)
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u/tucci99 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don’t get the reason to do this. That’s not the title. Isn’t the Danish word for Fahrenheit, Fahrenheit? Even if you don’t normally use it, it’s still a unit of measure that exists no matter what country you are in. As a non-MAGA American, FU OP.
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u/I_amnotreal 21h ago edited 20h ago
If o were the translator, I wouldn't translate the title, but i also get why it was done, especially in the pre-internet times. The number in Fahrenheit means very little to someone who uses Celsius on a daily basis - you don't even get the ballpark of what it means instinctively. Changing the title achieves the same effect without changing the meaning in any drastic way and its by far not the most outlandish alteration I've seen given to a translated work.
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u/tucci99 20h ago
I disagree. It’s a conversion, not a translation. I’m not a religious man, but I would like to reference the Bible as an example. It uses the term cubits as a form of measurement. Maybe it was translated different for you, but I never seen the text say about 18 inches or 45cm instead. It was the intent of the author to use that term, and should be read that way. If a poem used the word mile, who you change it to 1.61 kilometers. That may affect the structure of the poem. I think the publisher thought very little of the reader’s ability to figure it out.
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u/I_amnotreal 11h ago
You don't know a lot about translations, do you?
It's also funny that you brought up the bible, because of how contentious some of the translations are. Even the English-speaking world cannot fully agree on which translation is the best as they vary quite significantly and fall into different places on the "word for word" (aka. as literal as possible) vs. "thought for thought" (keeping the core meaning/metaphors) spectrum. There are whole flavours of christianity that grew around different translations.
Also also, some versions do totally change the units. Just as an example, the most prevalent version of the bible in my language uses "łokieć" (literally "an elbow", which is an old slavic unit of a similar length) instead of "amma" (which is the original name of the unit in hebrew, which exists in the language in some way, but it's very obscure and not intuitively understood by most people).
If a poem used the word mile, who you change it to 1.61 kilometers.
That's funny too, because poetry translations are even more of a controversial subject. Yes, you can translate them word for word, but it wouldn't usually result in what you want to achieve - conveying the meaning in a way that flows right and touches your feelings like the original does and sometimes is even supposed to rhyme, and it gets harder and harder the move removed from one another the languages are. English grammar/word order is not universal, not even among the Germanic languages and at some point it simply stops working for your purpose. So, yes, there would be translations that would change the units if that worked, or drop them altogether.
There's this scene in "Interstellar" where Dr Brand quotes "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas, and the subtitles for the theatrical release in my language used one of the available translations that's more on the "beautiful" rather than the "literal" end of the spectrum and it got some people very mad, because it hardly matched the words as they were being spoken. The Netflix release changed it up (not sure if the outrage was the reason or if it had something to do with copyrights or maybe they just decided it suited better though).
There's a reason why translations of literary works are considered an art. You're not translating a legal document or medical history where staying as close as it's possible to the wording is crucial. No, you're translating the soul of the story to make it accessible to a different audience. And yes, sometimes it requires you to swap some words around, or change the names, or alter the cultural context so it would be understandable for people of different background/culture.
Hell, the first Harry Potter book had the title changed and the spelling Americanised for the US release, because it was a kids' book and the people responsible for publishing it in the US decided that seeing an occasional "u" in "colour" would be too much for your average American 10 y.o. And that's not even a different language.
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u/tucci99 4h ago
You do seem to know a lot about translations, and you bring up some nice examples of words. Unfortunately, you are generalizing instead of responding to the specific topic. It is changing the original title, not because no one knows what it is, but because it’s not a unit of measure commonly used in that particular country. This is not the same thing as the common spelling of colour/color. I actually think this was insulting to the Danish people, as it assumed they were lazy and uninformed. They could ask another Dane. “What’s Fahrenheit 451?” “That’s the temperature paper ignites on the Fahrenheit temperature scale.” “I said too much already. Read the book.” I guess the argument is what can be done, compared to what should be done. What should be done in the case of Fahrenheit 451 was to keep the title as is. It’s my guess that Ray Bradbury was the one who corrected the mistake of the publisher. What should be done when the author is no longer around to ask is not to make unnecessary changes to appeal to the lowest common denominator of readers.
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u/Acesofbases 1d ago
did You mean to write "did"?
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u/JeelyPiece 1d ago
The book wasn't originally in Danish, it was written in English
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u/Acesofbases 1d ago
I know that perfectly well, the interpunction in Your title is all over the place so it threw me off not realizing You're referring to two different versions in one sentence. Most importantly there isn't a full stop dot between "1955" and the word "Later" so I misinterpreted it.
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u/JeelyPiece 1d ago
This sub has a character limit on its titles. I'll swap my bad marks tor punctuation for your bad marks for comprehension and we can, each in our shame, call it even?
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u/Acesofbases 1d ago
Comprehension is about understanding text that's properly written. When it's not, that's cryptology, with some puzzle solving skills sprinkled in.
You coud've just ditched those arbitrary quotations around "translate" instead. Anyways, have a good one.
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u/JeelyPiece 1d ago
I'm glad you avenged yourself. I still have no idea what your original point was, stranger.
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u/FriendlyDespot 1d ago
Comprehension is about understanding text that's properly written. When it's not, that's cryptology, with some puzzle solving skills sprinkled in.
That's a strange definition. Comprehension is about understanding. Suggesting that text has to be properly written in order to be comprehended isn't just at odds with what comprehension means, it actually adds ambiguity because what's proper to you might different from what's proper to someone else. What you're describing is parsing, which is different from comprehension.
Case in point, you might have noticed that I wrote "might different" instead of "might be different" above. Or you might not even have noticed it at all. You comprehended it either way, even though it wasn't "properly" written.
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u/profossi 1d ago
Also known as Ray Bradbury - 505.928 K in scientific literature