[…] Dolores represented one of the toughest puzzles Sabine had encountered: “Dolores” doesn’t rhyme with any German words for a body part, and a fabricated name would detract from the joke. Just because Jerry’s friends guessed “Bovary” as a legitimate name option in English didn’t mean she could throw any old name around in German.
It was just another day in the life of a translator tackling Seinfeld. But it was a particularly vexing one.
More so than the average American sitcom, Seinfeld has had difficulty reaching global audiences. While it’s popular in Latin America, it hasn’t been widely accepted in Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Two decades after it went off the air, Seinfeld remains relevant to American audiences — thanks in part to omnipresent syndicated reruns — but in much of Europe it is considered a cult hit, and commonly relegated to deep-late-night time slots. Its humor, it seems, is just too complicated, too cultural and word-based, to make for easy translation.
With the show now finally coming to streaming services for the first time this month,Seinfeld had another shot at gaining a worldwide audience. But the fact that today it began streaming on Hulu, not Netflix, is telling: Netflix is available across dozens of countries around the world — Hulu is only available in the United States and Japan.
Jokes are the hardest things to translate into another language, another culture, another world. A good script for dubbing an American sitcom for foreign consumption does more than literally translate. It manages to convey the same meaning, the same feeling, the same story — the same direct hit to the lower frontal lobes of the brain that produces a laugh, even though those frontal lobes are steeped in a completely different cultural brew.
And because of Seinfeld’s unique approach to comedy, it poses special translation problems. In one Radboud University study of Dutch viewers’ reactions to Seinfeld, viewers commonly reported being baffled by the show’s laugh track; the audience regularly missed the joke. More.
See: The Verge
Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.
Comments about this article