• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Translate This!

  • Home
  • About / Contact
  • Public Key
  • Back to Website

Frozen

Posted: 2014-02-01 – Leave a Comment

Who would have guessed that it is the movie industry that seems to revert the race-to-the-bottom trend in foreign-language localization? The same industry that is notorious for nonsensical translations of movie titles? Well, “reverting” is maybe an exaggeration, but read the Rebecca Keegan article ‘Frozen’: Finding a diva in 41 languages, which appeared in today’s print edition of the Los Angeles Times. (The printed article adds a few more aspects of this localization effort, such as title, movie posters, etc.)

Not all movies get the treatment described in the article. If translators were to limit themselves to foreign-language subtitling in this city, they’d starve. And with German as my target language, I have to deal with the additional problem that movies are dubbed for Germany, not subtitled, and that this process takes place in Germany. It seems that “Not Afraid of Subtitles,” the motto with which the Los Angeles family-owned movie theater chain Laemmle is getting viewers for its non-English movie fare, would not fly in Germany.

Localization of technical products or websites is not exactly the same as what Disney’s Rick Dempsey gives as the reasons for localizing the animated film Frozen. But with ever larger portions of the movie business coming from non-English speaking countries, it makes sense to cater to those audiences. And to protect the Disney name and reputation, it has to be done well. You’d think that this is a logic all our clients would understand.

Share

Catgerories: In the News, Translation Tags: language dubbing, localization, subtitling

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Search Blog

Flash Player

This blog started back in 2003, and many media files require Adobe Flash Player – too many to change all the entries. Flash Player is not a welcome guest anymore, and your browser may display it as a dark rectangle. Right-click on the rectangle, and if Flash is installed as an add-on you can enable it and play the media content.

Categories

Past Posts

My Weather

Los Angeles CA
Cloudy
14°C
 

Santa Monica Beach Cam

B E A C H   C A M

Tweets

  • RT @Kurt_Vonnegut: Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand. » 2020/07/12
  • RT @LiteraryVienna: "Lügen erscheinen dem Verstand häufig viel einleuchtender und anziehender als die Wahrheit, weil der Lügner den großen… » 2020/05/28
  • RT @chrisdocnee: And in the most Quarantine Moment ever, my son and I decided to drive all four freeways to do the full loop of LA and time… » 2020/05/04
  • RT @HonTom5: @clientsfh There are a lot of clients who want validation they would have been amazing at what you do. » 2020/04/23
  • RT @brettroberts: This is insane. Corona virus deaths vs. other epidemics from day of first death... https://t.co/4eMJVUuLVk » 2020/04/11
@translatethis

Copyright © 2021 · Translate This!