Oh - that's hilarious and partly quite absurd!
I've never seen the German subtitles.
Wonderful job, QE!

I love this screencap from the Japanese version.  It's actually differnent than what is onscreen, because in Japanese, context means a lot.  They don't have an equivalent to "the", so they referred to Irene Adler as "that woman" or "ano onna".  At the end, when Sherlock says "The woman...the woman", he says it "Ano onna...ano...onna", but the subtitle is different:



It says "Hiruinaki onna", which means "The woman without parallel".

Last edited by sj4iy (June 20, 2013 6:03 pm)

Reichenbach with informal addressing. Touching.

Well, after watching the whole series 2 with these subtitles I have to say, honestly, I cannot recommend doing that. As soon as the informal "Sie" is missing, the impression that Sherlock and John are a couple becomes so intense sometimes it's not even funny anymore. I felt confused.

The subtitles are strange. More accurate than the dubbing, but ... when two people are living together and say things to each other like, "Du machst nie Kaffee", without the distancing "Sie", and all the time ...

Reviving this thread because I think the French translators did a pretty good job of the "amo/love" problem in The Six Thathers. I'm not aware of any French word that's abbreviated to "amo", whereas the French for "love" is "amour" which would have been to close.

So they changed Lady Smallwood's code name to "Venus" and put "Afro" on the screen as overheard code name (and of course in the dialogue, but at first I watched the English version) - "Afro like the hairstyle" (that is actually mentioned). When Sherlock makes the connection, he asks his brother whether he remembers his mythology lessons - Afro is short for Aphrodite, the Greek equivalent to the Roman Venus.

Pretty clever, I thought!

 

In The Lying Detective they had another problem, which for my understanding of French wasn't quite as well solved: In the original Sherlock says he takes Faith's case because she said that her life turned on one word, whereas names always are two words. In French "anybody" is "n'importe qui", "somebody" would be "quelqu'un" - three and two words respectively.

The solution they've found is Sherlock pointing out that "a few words" (quelque mots) is not the the same thing as "last and first name" (nom et prénom) - and frankly, I'm not sure whether there is really a distinction made between "name" and "word"...

Unfortunately I'm missing lots of nuances in the dubbing, because I'm not a native speaker and find especially Sherlock (both the show and the man himself) very hard to understand. And French subtitles are so unreliable that I've not yet looked at them. Maybe I should...

Edited to add: I tried, and discovered that the French DVDs don't have subtitles for the hard-of-hearing (i. e. the dubbed version). So I'll never know what Moriarty said for "the big G" (what I understand - bastourdi or bas tour D - is not in the dictionary, though D for directeur would be logical)

Last edited by Kittyhawk (October 12, 2017 11:23 am)