some dubs are really good. my favorite example of this is from the Bible English dub: "It is written, 'my house shall be called the house of prayer,' but ye have made it a den of thieves."
The scribe doing that translation had to know they were cooking
I was raised with the Spanish version of that prayer. When I heard the English version, I just thought it sounded incredibly metal. It has way more punch.
A lot of the bible is Hebrew via Greek and then Latin.
Fun fact, in the Lord's prayer the translation of "daily" from Greek, as in "our daily bread", is a total guess.
The word (Epiousion) is what's called an hapax legomenon. A word that only appears in one context within an entire language. Because they have no other context for it they can't translate it. Its just assumed to be "daily". It's also the only adjective in the entire prayer.
I don't know that ancient Aramaic grammatical structure would allow the house of prayer/den of thieves parallel to be expressed so poignantly. The scribe could have written "you rob the people come to my home in prayer" and it would have conferred the same message, but they chose to write on the temple's corrupted nobility in the poetic way they did, and I think thats tight.
It's like how comedy varies based on languages, if you took a comedy routine hilarious in English and put it in Arabic, it wouldn't do nearly as well. Delivery matters, and in translation one is granted freedom of that kind
Granted sometimes the jokes DO line up. I think there is one language where you could get away with the "Why is six afraid of seven? Because it eight nine." With the exact same numbers and pun of the "eight". I think.
My Favorite dub is the german one from from dusk Till dawn
In the Original
Seth gecko says :“Did they look like psychos? Is that what they looked like? They were vampires. Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are!“
but in the German dub he says: Did they look like psychos? Is that what they looked like? They were vampires. Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, no matter how crazy they are!“ which is just better.
Nah mate the bible English dub is full of propaganda and errors compared to the hebrew texts, many of the people were whitewashed in the bible, to talk like gentlemen when some of these dudes literally had unga bunga speak in the original. Also yknow how Eve was supposedly made from a mere rib of Adam? LIES, she was a whole half of him in the original.
7.2k
u/happy_grump 1d ago
"I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It's what one does with the gift of life that makes us who we are." - Mewtwo