bowler hat and leather boots

[sergebroom]

It has been said that to translate is to betray, or that meanings are lost in the process. It’s not always the case though, and can even be the opposite.

Take The Avengers, for example.

Does a story about avengers sound like something where the male lead has been described as someone who fights mad scientists with all the care he’d give to opening a bottle of champagne, and who opens a champagne bottle with all the care he’d give to fighting mad scientists?

Does the title convey that atmosphere of whimsy?
Anything but that.

Compare that to the show’s title in French. It was called Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir, which means Bowler Hat and Leather Boots.

Now that sounds whimsical.
I think.

I wonder if other languages went for a literal translation of the original, or a translation of its spirits.

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I've no idea what it was called in Spanish. I do know that Hill Street Blues was La tristeza de Hill Street, 'The Sadness of Hill Street' which didn't seem quite right.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

"The Sadness of Hill Street"? That sounds like an opera. Then again Bocchco once did Cop Rock, a musical cop show.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

It does a bit.

[pedanther]

Looks to me like somebody got hold of the wrong colloquial sense of "Blues".


The Spanish title of The Avengers is just Los vengadores, which is a bit unimaginative - although not as unimaginative as the Italian Agente Speciale, "Special Agent".

The Germans have the right idea, though: their title is Mit Schirm, Charme und Melone, "With umbrella, charm, and bowler hat".

--Paul A.

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

Looks to me like somebody got hold of the wrong colloquial sense of "Blues".

Rather, only got a hold of one of them. That's the thing about translating. The real artistry comes in finding a way to carry across a double-meaning like "Blues" has in that title.

That's really all I have to say, as all my translating has little to do with TV show titles otherwise. :)

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

C'mon... Give it a try.

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

οἰ νεμέσεις?

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

The Fates?

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

Nemeses. There are a lot of options for "Avengers" in Greek, and I liked this one. :)

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Actually, there was another British spy show of that era called The Champions, who worked for a UN type of organization based in Geneva, and it was called Nemesis.

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

There's definitely a relationship between being an avenger and a champion of something. Also: superhero!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

As in Marvel's Avengers?

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

Exactly!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

In that case though the name is an accurate depiction. Those superguys are anything but whimsical. While John Steed, Emma Peel and Tara King are.

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, I've never seen the tv show. Hee. This is where you offer to lend me DVDs and I remind you that I still have your Dune miniseries that you loaned me last summer, right?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I'd most happily lend you The Avengers, but I don't own it on DVD. Or on tape. I myself was thinking of a revisit thru the wonder of NetFlix.

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

Good plan. We recently quit netflix, though, in favor of digital cable.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Yes. I can see that.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I like the German title quite a bit, although it seems to leave out the feminine half of the team. Unless 'charm' can apply to men and women, like it does in French. On the other hand, the French title refers to one of Steed's weapons, and to Emma's.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Definitely the wrong colloquial sense.

Agente Speciale? What the hell did they call 'Danger Man'?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Why? Because (cue in Johnny River) "He's a man who leads a life of danger..."

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Danger Man was what that series was called in England. I was wondering what the Italian version was called.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I shudder to think.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

L'uomo del pericolo doesn't sound quite right.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I definitely shudder to think.

[tania-c.livejournal.com]

Good question. When I first started learning foreign languages, I had a hard time with the concept of not translating literally. Then one day, it made sense that we were translating to communicate the ideas and concepts the words were shaping.

Huge breakthrough for a kid of 12, let me tell you.

I like how Diana Rigg's leather boots get equal billing in the title.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Say, do you remember if Tara King wore the boots too? It's been a long time since I saw the show.

[tania-c.livejournal.com]

No, I don't remember. This seems like a good excuse to watch the show.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Boots aside.. That ahah! moment was a great feeling, wasn't it?

[tania-c.livejournal.com]

Completely great feeling. The funny thing, is that I had been speaking with Russian kids for years, but we really didn't translate back and forth with Russian/English, or at least not that way. We were just kids at school chatting with each other.

It wasn't until I was studying Latin and being forced to translate passages, and getting frustrated because I was technically correct but otherwise incorrect. Then, one day, Eureka!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I know the feeling. When I was taking math classes in high-school, they'd tell us that dividing a value by zero would result in an infinite number. Being too preoccupied with getting good grades (probably like 99% of the other kids), I never asked why that would work out that way. Then, one day, when I was considerably older than 12 years old, I figured it out on my own. That too was a eureka moment. Great feeling indded.

[pedanther]

Mention of "chapeau melon" always reminds me of Asterix in Britain, in which there is one panel where the background detail includes a posh-looking Englishman arguing with a greengrocer holding half a melon.

In the original French, their conversation is a joking reference to bowler hats that doesn't work in English, so the translators invented a new joke to replace it; it's said that when René Goscinny heard the new joke, he laughed and said he wished he'd thought of it first.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Because of where I'm from, I read Asterix in French, but it's been a long time since I came across that specific story. Still I can see how the melon joke wouldn't carry over. What was the translation's joke?

[pedanther]

It has to be said that if you're not familiar with the relevant English colloquialism, the English joke may be just as incomprehensible as a literal translation of the French one would have been. Anyway, here it is:

Grocer: "Oh, so this melon's bad, is it?!"
Customer: "Rather, old fruit!"

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I presume that 'fruit' here doesn't have the same meaning that it has in America. Or does it?

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

No, it's a variant on 'old chap'. Here, of course, it's a pun.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Ah hah! I think it might translate as vieille pomme, or old apple, in French.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Hmm.......

[pedanther]

About the title: The Avengers was grittier and less whimsical when it began than it was by the time Emma Peel joined the team: more gangsters, smugglers, and blackmailers, and a distinct lack of mad scientists. And the pilot episode does apparently involve Steed and his then-sidekick avenging the death of the sidekick's fiancee.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

It'd then make sense that the show was called by that title. Wasn't Honor Blackman Steed's partner in those early days?

[pedanther]

Honor Blackman didn't actually join the series until the second season, by which time The Avengers was beginning to take on its familiar shape.

In the first season, which tends to get overlooked - partly because it's so atypical in retrospect, but mostly because it's been lost to posterity apart from two or three episodes - Steed's sidekick was Dr David Keel (yes, a man), played by Ian Hendry. And I say "sidekick", but the series was actually created as a star vehicle for Hendry, so Keel was the protagonist and Steed was a mysterious character who he meets while trying to find his fiancee's murderer and who thereafter shows up on his doorstep from time to time and requests his help with something. (There's even an episode where Steed doesn't appear at all, in which Keel uncovers a mystery and solves it all by himself.) Then Hendry left the series, and Steed became the point-of-identification character and stopped being mysterious.

(Much like the first season of Sydney Newman's other great success story, come to think of it: Doctor Who also begins as the story of the sidekicks, thrust into a strange new world with a mysterious and occasionally sinister guide, who becomes less mysterious and more sympathetic once he's the only member of the original cast left.)

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I stand corrected. And my original post's premise, that the show's English title was misleading, has been blown even further out of the water. Heheheh...

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Since you know of the show's origins, is it true that Steed seldom if used a gun? My understanding is that was Macnee's request because he'd had his fill of those during the War.