Lost In Übersetzung

It must be a leftover thing from my very brief university career as a student of foreign languages, but I'm always fascinated by the art of translation, especially when it comes to translating comedy. So I read with interest an article on the BBC News website about translating 'Allo 'Allo into German. Well, the article was maybe about how they've finally sold the series to Germany after twenty years or so, but the translation bit was what really interested me.

'Allo 'Allo is a particularly difficult sitcom to translate, because of the funny conventions it established - the series is set in France, with characters from Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and basically when characters speak with a French accent, it means they're speaking French, whereas if they speak with an English accent, they're speaking English. And then there's Crabtree, who's English and speaks very bad French, which comes out as phrases like "Good moaning!" when he means "Good morning!" and "I have good nose" for "I have good news".

The French translation, I noticed, cheated, and had him say "Au revoir" for "good morning", rather than doing the mispronunciation thing, so I was pleased to hear that the German version has him saying "Guten Magen", which is much more in keeping with the original. But I do wonder what they're going to do with his mispronunciations when the joke involves something happening on screen. Like when a tank crashes into the pissoir while he's using it and he observes "It seems there is no piss for the wicked..."

This is why I admire people like the great Anthea Bell, who practically nobody else has heard of. She translated the Asterix books into English, and those have no end of untranslatable plays-on-words. So she has to come up with new jokes herself that keep the general feel of the ones in the original - and does a really brilliant job of it, too. I'd love to do something like that, as I think I've mentioned before, with Joscha Sauer's "Nichtlustig" comics. A lot of the jokes are simple to translate, some would involve a real stretch of the imagination. Tomorrow, if nothing more exciting happens to me in the meantime, I'll scan and post some examples...