Discussion Main / IncidentalMultilingualWordplay

Renamed from Lucky Translation and made Trivia per TRS:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=16780895810.13317600&page=1#comment-22

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Misused, started by FernandoLemon on Oct 20th 2019 at 7:48:44 AM

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Needs Help, started by FernandoLemon on Mar 22nd 2020 at 6:40:08 PM

Deleted:

• The Latin American title Irene, yo y mi otro yo ("Me, my other me and Irene"), though not as clever, still manages to retain the original English wordplay.
  • The Spaniard title would be Yo, yo mismo e Irene, which is a literal translation and the wordplay is practically intact.

Hmmm, no, it doesn't. The English title invokes the idea of "I" a third time with "Irene". This is kept in the Hungarian title because "I" is "én" in Hungarian. This is not the case in either Spanish version, because Irene and "Yo" (the Spanish word for "I") do not share sounds, so the idea of "I" is only brought two times in the title instead of three (and the third time that is the only one that qualifies as a pun, is also the one that is lost in Spanish).

With regard to the Pokémon examples:

• Misty qualifies insofar as both are used as girl's names.
• The two movie examples fit rather well. Although they could make things harder for other countries working off the English Dub
• The "DeeDee" example seems to me to be an Invoked occurance. Here is what I think the course of events were:
  1. Original game writers name the female protagonist.
  2. Anime writers introduce a Forgotten Childhood Friend with references to a Noodle Incident.
  3. Game Translators give the English version of the female protagonist's name.
  4. Anime dubbers use a possible nickname for any girl starting with "D" in their translation of the intro of the Noodle Incident.
  5. A year or so goes by... allowing the Anime parties to get on the same page so that The Reveal goes smoothly
     
     In essence, to me the "DeeDee" example is forced, although in the dub, we get a partial Title Drop out of it. In other words, not so much "lucky" as "coordinated".

Shouldn't this be considered a Trivia entry?

I removed

• The pronoun jibun, as in English, is technically a reflexive pronoun (i.e., when the the subject is also the object of a verb, I kill myself) but can also be used for effect, as in 'even I myself need to shower everyday.'.

It does work the same way in Japanese and English, but it's not actually something that would really contribute to the translation of a pun/metaphor/etc.

I removed the following example :

• In the Sherlock Holmes movie, the French-speaking Dredger appears after a long absence, is shot at, avoids the gunshot, and asks "Tu m'as manqué?" This is translated in subtitles as "Did you miss me?"— which has the exact same double meaning as the French phrase.

In fact, "tu m'as manqué ?" translates as "Did I miss you?" I didn't see the movie ; is Dredger really asking a question when he says "tu m'as manqué ?" It sounds kinda silly to ask of someone if you missed them (in the return-from-absence sense), whereas "tu m'as manqué", without the question mark, would translate as "I missed you", which makes more sense in context and does have the double meaning... but only in French. You can indeed translate it as "Did you miss me?", which doesn't have the exact same meaning as the French phrase but retains its double meaning. Of course, this isn't really a Lucky Translation anymore, which is why I chose to remove the example.