Papers of the newest comedians (Comic Strips)
- Jim Davis has said that he tries to avoid puns and American-centric references in Garfield so that the strip can translate internationally, but he didn't always do that at first, leading to some pretty bad translations in at least the Spanish version:
- In an early strip, "I ate a Milk Dud and kissed a cat" became "I hate spoiled milk and kissing cats." Obviously, this was a too-literal translation of "Milk Duds".
- Another strip didn't seem to grasp that "Good Humor man" referred to an ice cream truck, so "Good Humor" got translated literally to refer to a friendly/sympathetic man.
- "I feel like a dirty magazine" (as in, a pornographic magazine) became "I feel like a dirty old magazine" (as in, unwashed).
- And other times, the translators just managed to screw up anyway:
- In a strip where Garfield is caught up a tree and says that he's "on a sturdy limb", Garfield's dialogue was translated to something like "Pero al menos no he roto una pata" ("But at least I haven't broken a limb/leg") even though he's clearly pointing to a branch, making it clear that the "sturdy limb" he's talking about is the tree branch.
- Another 1983 strip turned "They say the pet alligators that are flushed into the sewers grow to huge proportions" into "They say that there are enormous crocodiles" (?!?) with no explanation as to how they'd gotten there.
- The Garfield translators have gotten much better, to the point that they sometimes embellish the jokes with Spanish puns or rhymes (including some that even translate back into English). However, they're still not infallible:
- "Somewhere between Floyd the whistling snake and crabgrass
" became "Somewhere between a snake and a crab." - This one had the translators failing to realize that "chili dog" is a food, and thus translated it as "chihuahua".
- This one, being a rare exception to the "no wordplay" rule, got translated literally and ruined the joke.
- These two strips accidentally ended up with each other's dialogue in the Spanish translation.
- This 2010 strip: Jon is reading his menu upside down, and asks Liz if he can order the "beef stew" (written upside-down). In the Spanish version, they forgot to invert the words, thus killing the joke. Considering how well most of the other strips are translated, this one really stands out as a glaring error.
- In this strip, "'Sup?" (i.e. "What's up?") became "[Do you want to have] dinner?" Granted, this does make sense in context given Garfield's ravenous personality.
- "Somewhere between Floyd the whistling snake and crabgrass
- A French translation error: in this 1982 strip◊, Odie eats Garfield's hamburger and says "ribbit", a joke on his long, frog-like tongue. The translators changed this to "Gotcha...◊", missing the point that Odie doesn't talk beyond sound effects.
- This seems to be standard operating procedure for the Spanish comics on gocomics.com. One FoxTrot strip had Jason mention that he wanted "cash" for Christmas and got a Johnny Cash album. The Spanish translator paid no heed to the pun and simply translated "cash" as "efectivo", destroying the entire point of the joke and putting nothing in its place. One translation that would have worked for Spanish is if Jason had said he asked for lana (Spanish for "wool" but also a slang for money) and gotten a sweater instead of money.
- In Poland at least, Dilbert strips in their book editions do get plagued with translation problems from time to time, depending on who's translating. One spectacular example is when two strips were rendered incomprehensible because "static" was translated as "movie extras". (The translator probably confused "static" with the word statysta.)
- Due to how frequently the Swedish strips contain direct translations, typos and grammar mistakes, it makes you wonder if the strips were proofread or not before they got published.
- This strip has the term "stealth clothing" translated as "invisible clothes".
- Here Wally says his smartwatch has been infected by ransomware. The translation suggests that he has fallen victim to "ransom glitches".
- The phrase "Seriously, dudes?" became something among the lines of "Why, like, what?".
- In this comic strip where Dilbert's mother asks him, after monitoring his fitbit, to stop "whatever [he's] doing". The fitbit was omitted in the translation and instead she is monitoring him, which ruins the joke.
- This strip
- Due to how frequently the Swedish strips contain direct translations, typos and grammar mistakes, it makes you wonder if the strips were proofread or not before they got published.
- The Swedish Beetle Bailey magazinenote has an odd case of this. The puns are either left untranslated and published as "English Reading Practice" strips (with every other word given a translation beneath the strip, thus explaining the joke) or given creative replacements (most often regarding Wiley's Dictionary, which has inserted puns about things like sugar cubes suffering from rabiesnote ). However they still mess up in odd ways, like translating English loanwords literally when most Swedes would borrow the English term instead (like Smartphone → "min smarta mobil" = my generic phone (of any kind) that is clever")
