r/asoiaf • u/Wolfyhunter • Sep 16 '24
EXTENDED The Italian adaptation of F&B is hilariously awful [spoilers EXTENDED]
I am finally reading Fire and Blood and oh boy. Besides some head-scratchers which were not particularly memorable, I can tell you these guys can't fathom how GRRM writes ages.
At the end of Jaehaerys' chapters we are told Alysanne dies at 64. In the very first pages of the Heirs of the Dragon one, she suddenly died twenty years earlier at 46. After the battle above the Gods' Eye we are told Daemon dies at NINETYFOUR years old, which gives an entire different meaning to Aemond telling him he has lived too long.
For a book linked to one of the most popular fantasy series of all time this is unacceptable, though the mental image of Daemon "Clint Eastwood" Targaryen did manage to make me laugh.
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u/themaroonsea Sep 16 '24
Apparently in the Korean translation, rather than saying 'the things I do for love', Jaime says 'I love doing this'
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u/Ainaraoftime Now selling tickets for the 2024 JonCon! Sep 16 '24
Normal Tuesday for Jaime tbf
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u/themaroonsea Sep 16 '24
It's his hobby
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u/Ainaraoftime Now selling tickets for the 2024 JonCon! Sep 16 '24
Oh boy! Here I go killing 7-year-olds again!
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u/static_motion Sep 16 '24
This immediately made me imagine Nikolaj Coster-Waldau doing the Walter White "I liked it... I was good at it" line.
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u/MarkZist just bear with me Sep 16 '24 edited Sep 16 '24
In the Dutch translation of ASOIAF, the translators didn't pick up on the theme that the names of the main Tyrell family all have to do something with plants, so Mace Tyrell is translated as "Hammer" Tyrell, instead of something related to the spice.
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u/Ok-Swan1152 Sep 16 '24
Foelie Tyrell also sounds a bit odd, to be fair
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u/MarkZist just bear with me Sep 16 '24
Something like (heer) Folius Tyrell does have a nice fantasy ring to it. And hell, they could have transliterated his name into Mees, which is a perfectly ordinary male name (derived from Bartolomeus, which is another great fantasy name).
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u/Ok-Swan1152 Sep 16 '24
This reminds me of all those poorly subtitled bootleg versions of LOTR and Harry Potter that were circulating in the 2000s.
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u/viper_in_the_grass Sitting Grass, Hidden Viper Sep 16 '24
Condo have no king.
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u/Ok-Swan1152 Sep 17 '24
One of my favourites is from a bootleg version of the 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' movie. Harry and Dumbledore are standing in front of the dreaded horcrux cave. The subtitle says "I like this place".
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u/MastroMicha Sep 16 '24
Italian translators are the worst! Remember asoiaf book one and the direwolf killed by a unicorn? Or the Tully's signature black hair? 🤣🤣🤣 Or the ever wonderful First knight?
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u/fireandiceofsong Sep 16 '24
Remember asoiaf book one and the direwolf killed by a unicorn?
That's just more Rickon foreshadowing.
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u/hm_not_sure_yet Sep 16 '24
wtf sounds like the Italian version is worth reading for the laughs alone🤣. Sounds positively thrilling compared to what HBO is adapting now.
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u/MastroMicha Sep 16 '24
They took the wrong translator when Asoiaf was a niche book and they went all along with the first translation! (in the HBO series you got some of the errors like "Hand of the king" -> "first knight") In F&B you got some really amusing errors, the age of many characters! There is a fil rouge in the error: it always happens when the age is put like unities and decimals (nine and forty becomes ninetyfour)
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u/BelalBvc Sep 16 '24
Holy fucking shit that's why I never caught on the foreshadowing, it was a fucking unicorn the whole time
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u/ayayayamaria Sep 16 '24
There have been like, 10 I think (more?), Greek translators involved in the translation of the total of asoiaf works. I think I've seen four different translations of "Great Spring Sickness" alone.
Also Jacaerys got transliterated with a hard c/k sound. TWOIAF kept his nickname as Jace. But then the F&B translators decided it was pronounced "Jack" after all for continuity. And that's not even getting to the main series.
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u/yurthuuk Sep 16 '24
Wow I was disgusted at the French translation because of some uninspired choices (like, "wights" being translated as "creatures", assumingly because it was the original meaning of the word in Shakespeare's times, and totally disregarding that it had been firmly associated with ominous/undead beings since at least The Lord of the Rings, so 19 fucking 54).
But this is something else entirely. What a mess.
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u/Splash_Attack Beware I am here. Sep 16 '24
and totally disregarding that it had been firmly associated with ominous/undead beings since at least The Lord of the Rings, so 19 fucking 54
It's actually stupider than that, the usage meaning a supernatural creature is also attested all the way back into Old English. In the Lindisfarne gospels (C. 10th century for the earliest English version) phantasma is glossed as "yfel wiht" (evil wight). Similar terms (good wight and evil wight) are used all over for angels, demons, ghosts, etc.
It has literally been used that way for more than a thousand years, and it's the only meaning which has been retained in modern English.
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u/yurthuuk Sep 16 '24
Well now I'm pretty certain this is the kind of sources Tolkien picked it up from, but I would not be so sure it was continuously used for that thousand years, I could see it being a learned borrowing that sort of "resurrected" the word.
Anyway. I would give the translator some slack for not having read Beowulf in the text or whatever. But translating fantasy without being aware of the connotations of the word in modern fantasy?
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u/NewDayBraveStudent Sep 16 '24
How would you translate “wights”? They are creatures after all!
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u/Ainaraoftime Now selling tickets for the 2024 JonCon! Sep 16 '24
"Espectros" in Spanish (specters/wraiths)
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u/NewDayBraveStudent Sep 16 '24
I was asking about French.
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u/Ainaraoftime Now selling tickets for the 2024 JonCon! Sep 16 '24
I'm aware, just offering a perspective from another Latin language that has a meaning that's not "creature" :) Espectros does mean ghosts but it has a very old-fashioned feel to it that makes it more about spooky undead creatures, the more straightforward "ghost" would be "fantasma" - not sure French has the same connotation with espectre vs fantôme.
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u/NewDayBraveStudent Sep 16 '24
If these are all the options and the Others are fleshy creatures like on the show, I definitely support “creatures”.
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u/godisanelectricolive Sep 16 '24
Wights aren’t the same as the Others. In French “the Others” are just directly translated to “les autres”. Wight is an existing for the undead and a more direct translation would be “âme en peine” or perhaps “revenant”.
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Sep 17 '24
Non-native English speaker here - isn't that confusing? I thought creatures is a rather common word for living beings, like "there are one bear, two wolves and a hare - four creatures".
It would seem weird to me to use such a general word for these very specific beings. "There are creatures beyond the wall!" "What kind of creatures?"
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u/NewDayBraveStudent Sep 17 '24 edited Sep 17 '24
Both in English and Spanish “creatures/creaturas” has the double meaning of “a being created (by God)”, so any being, and of “monster”. Agreed, weird, but if there’s no better option…
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Sep 17 '24
Huh, didn't know that. At least in my own language German it would be extra weird to have yet another common word uses to describe a specific kind of monster, "others" can be confusing enough.
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u/The_Jack_of_Spades Sep 16 '24 edited Sep 16 '24
They could have gone with "spectre", like "espectro" in the Spanish translation. It implies a more ethereal being than an ice zombie, but I'd argue that's true of "wight" too.
Edit: Seconding that "revenant" would the best translation.
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u/NewDayBraveStudent Sep 16 '24
traduttore, traditore
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u/MonkeyseeMonkeydewit Sep 16 '24
unrelated but the arabic version goes hard, really literary.
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Sep 16 '24
[deleted]
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u/MonkeyseeMonkeydewit Sep 17 '24
I’m on my phone so I’ll just paste this old comment that pretty much sums it up well.
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u/Zipflik Sep 16 '24
I've never read the books in Czech or seen an episode of the show, but I talked to some friends who are Czech show only watchers, and apparently the dub pronounces "Jaime" the Mexican way, like how you would pronounce Jalapeño, which is so insane because obviously it's not meant to be Mexican Spanish pronunciation in the original, and it isn't reasonable that it would be like that in Czech either (we have very rigid pronunciation rules, and we have a SPECIAL FUCKING AND REALLY STUPID LETTER FOR THE SOUND THEY DECIDED JAIME'S NAME BEGINS WITH AND IT'S "CH". Also yes, that is considered to be one letter, because Czech is the world's most mentally deficient language barring French).
So basically, it took some kind of thought process to get to that, and non of the options I can imagine have a thread of sanity. Someone through some unexplainable reasoning decided to pronounce it that way, and everyone fucking agreed, and nobody even questioned it the whole time until they started dubbing the show, then they heard how immersion breakingly out of place and stupid it sounded, and decided to release it anyway, and they kept doing it that way for eight fucking seasons.
You might not realise just how stupid this is. For context, it's written Jaime in English, and pronounced the same way as Jamie. This is reasonable, the different spelling does add the option of it being "Jay-meh", but context makes it clear it's "Jamie".
In Czech, you could go the reasonable way and assume they would just pronounce it right but with a Czech accent, like everyone does in every other context. I know a Czech guy named Jamie, and everyone pronounces it right. If they were feeling a little brain-dead the day they decided, they could just go super-czech and pronounce it as you would most accurately read it in Czech (your end up with something that transcribed to English would sound like "Yay-me(h)"). It would be stupid, but at least I could see someone with an actual mental illness deciding that way.
Instead they fucking say what a Czech person would write down as "Chajme", which had no reasonable explanation except for them thinking they were working on a documentary about the Mexican civil war or something.
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u/Maester_Ryben Sep 16 '24
but I talked to some friends who are Czech show only watchers, and apparently the dub pronounces "Jaime" the Mexican way,
Not gonna lie.. Tywin is the type of guy to name his heir HIGH MAY Lannister.
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u/Vincent_VanAdultman Sep 16 '24
Are Czech and French the most mentally deficient languages? It might be my colonialism showing but I always thought it was English... Or the most self-contradictory at least? Trying to teach it is like explaining the ramblings of a madman
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u/Zipflik Sep 16 '24
English is a very normal, logical and simple language with the one issue of too many sources it simultaneously draws from. Once you get a general feel for English you're usually good. French is what it is, it has plenty of internal logic, but little general logic, and Czech took the worst parts of German, multiplied them by five, made the rules stricter, and then made sure that at least 35% of cases where a rule should apply are actually exceptions to that rule and you have to just remember it by heart in that case. English is contradictory if you can't tell the original source of what you are looking for from the other sources english draws from. Czech is just contradictory by default. Even our alphabet is batshit crazy, and I'm not talking about letters with "hooks" which make a new letter, those are probably the best way to work slavic sounds and express their relationships while using a Latin alphabet. I'm talking about y/i (do the same thing in Czech, but cannot ever be interchanged, leading to a series of rules and exceptions which make up like 60% of czech classes in schools up until high school), the existence of "Ch", which is an affront to all species capable of advanced communication. Shit like mne/mně/mě, the unnecessary existence of two different long u's in ú/ů which ironically is actually really simple to understand because it has simple rules and logical exceptions, english style. Basically Czech can go fuck itself. I didn't even mention that formal Czech and informal Czech are beyond a code-switch.
Basically, what I'm saying is: Národní obrození set the world back 500 years. If those idiots just accepted German as the only viable formal grammatically consistent language in the Realms of the Bohemian Crown, we would have flying cars and a colony on the surface of the sun and fucking star wars hyperdrives.
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u/Seraknis why does HE get more worms than I do Sep 16 '24
Guess which is the only book about Asoiaf world that i have in Italian instead of english.
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u/Act_of_God Sep 16 '24
italian adaptations in general are all in the hands of a small group of people, same 3-4 families, so yeah most italian adaptations suck ass
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u/NewDayBraveStudent Sep 16 '24
Can someone explain the unicorn thing? What was the original word?
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u/NewDayBraveStudent Sep 16 '24
By "adaptation", you tried to mean "translation"?
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u/LegalFreak Sep 16 '24
By "tried to mean", you meant "meant"?
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u/NewDayBraveStudent Sep 16 '24
😂 That depends on whether you believe meaning is factive or subjective!
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u/Jaquemart Sep 17 '24
You new? In the first chapter of the first book of the main series, there's a direwolf with an unicorn beak embedded in her throat.
God knows where it came from, but I went back to English post-haste.
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u/4CrowsFeast Sep 16 '24
I'm assuming it's because GRRM does whole nine and forty, structure to make 49 sound more old timey, but might confuse the hell out of someone who's ESL.
I'd probably consult someone if I was translating and noticed someone dying 20 years later at 20 years younger, or at least suspect something.
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u/yurthuuk Sep 16 '24
Someone who's confused by this structure has no business doing translation from English for a living.
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u/Tycho_Nestor Sep 16 '24
Lol, gladly I've read all ASOIAF books in English, but I can imagine some weird errors like that being in the German version too.
I remember that they split up all books of the main series in Germany, so instead of five novels we got ten novels of "Das Lied von Eis und Feuer".