OK, so I'm watching an episode of "Wonderfalls" (a TV show from a couple of years back) on DVD. The show is originally in English, but I'm watching it with the Spanish subtitles on, partly because I can add some notes to the (free) translation notes Wiki I'm working on, right?
Now, there's this line in the original dialogue where a character exclaims "Those sons of bisquits!" (not sure of the spelling of that last word, it might be a c and not a q there.).
This line is a play on the phrase "[Those] sons-of-bitches" (also sometimes seen as "son-of-a-bitches", or spelled either way minus the hyphens, or slang-ified as sonuvabitches or variations of that). The joke is that the character, possibly because he's in front of his (adult) daughter, tones down the crude and profane phrase to something rather silly and otherwise completely nonsensical.
In the Spanish subtitles, this line is translated to "Son unos bribones."
Now, when I tried to use Babelfish (I know, I know, I should know better by now...), it defined it as "loafers". Back-translating it did nothing, because it gave me an entirely different word. In English, "loafers" can mean someone who loiters and is lazy and such, OR it can mean a kind of (presumably comfortable) shoes. The back-translation gave me "idlers", so I'm ASSUMING it wasn't talking about shoes, but you really never know with Babelcrap, do you.
Now, I looked this up in my electronic dictionary, which is way better for individual words than Babelcrap, and got "rascal, scamp."
Is it just me or did they totally and utterly "clean up" a phrase that didn't need cleaning up due to being purposefully clean, therefore killing the joke? Or is there wordplay I'm completely missing, here?
Other than sheer curiousity and for the sake of accuracy when I write up the notes, I wanted to make sure I'm not completely crazy when I think that the Spanish translator(s) took the scripts and inexplicably cleaned them up.
Because in the episode before this, there's a line where this rude tourist uses the (really crude, profane, and delibrately rude/immature-like) phrase "my ass" (which is a very crude and usually immature way of negating something, a crude derivation of the idiom "my foot", as in "She's not lying, my FOOT!" ). The joke of course is that the rude tourist is really nasty and unpleasant, right down to the ways she speaks to other people, especially when she's not getting her way - Jaye even responds "Did you just say 'my ass' ?" with this look of disgust that says clearly "could you be any cruder or more low-brow?".
Said line was translated instead with the Spanish idiom "al diablo con eso", or "to the devil with [that]", much milder it would seem. Also, the phrase "poor bitch" was translated as "Pobre idiota" ("poor idiot").
I get that some things can't be gotten across well, that "my ass" is probably a hard-to-translate idiom and that Jaye's use of "poor bitch" to describe a male person is seemingly strange and probably the nuances of the word in English couldn't be captured in Spanish (the way she says it can equally imply both what the Spanish translation was, and possibly, when you think about it, that he's fate's "bitch", or submissive to the capricious whims of cruel, cruel destiny in other words).
However, surely that joke could have been replaced with an equivalent, using a derogatory phrase for an incompetant jerk (which was the context) or something, but replacing the key word with a similarly innocent-but-similar-sounding, nonsensical word, right?
Just wondering if I'm nuts, here.
-Runa27
