Misadventures in visual localization
Dec. 20th, 2023 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spiderbraidsTime for some randomness...
As I've previously posted, the main benefit to dubbing should always be being able to see a work in your own language ... Well, some dubbed versions go the extra mile by also translating the visuals :-) Sometimes it's just the credits, but sometimes, especially for animation, even the visual scenery itself gets translated, which French and Russian traditionally tend to get this extra treatment :-) Here are some examples of Russian localizations of Disney movies...
And here's some localization examples from The Owl House (Russian and German):
Other languages aren't as widely visually localized, but starting with Inside Out, Pixar started expanding its visual localization efforts beyond the usual languages that get the treatment... Here's Anger reading his paper in 6 different languages:
Incidentally, Pixar also rendered alternate textless [or at least, less text] visuals for 2001's Monsters Inc. (and I remember seeing these visuals when my sister watched it on a rental, though subtitles still referenced the original text):
(Taken from this source video)
And some examples comparing my own telesnaps of Thai localizations of Finding Dory and Coco with the original English (and in Dory's case, Russian):
(Yeah, it surprised me that there's even anything to localize in Coco to begin with given the Latino aesthetic, but whatever...)
But with shows and movies that aren't specifically visually localized for your country's language, you'd think that you'd always get the original language visuals by default... right? Well, I've seen some quite bizarre instances where that wasn't the case :-\
Sometimes, the people making the movies or shows provide a version with textless visuals to local distributors, who I assume are then expected to add their own translated text alongside dubbing, but sometimes instead end up just showing the textless visuals as-is (if you're watching a subtitled version, you might get the originally-displayed text translated as a subtitle :-\)... I've seen this on a couple of occasions, usually on local channels, but sometimes even on regional movie channels (usually along the lines of missing subtitles or on-screen text captions, but I also remember seeing Lilo and Stitch on the now-defunct Fox Family Movies, and seeing a shot of a book Lilo is reading that I assume was supposed to say "Magic", except the cover has been blanked out instead) Here's a GIF of how the title sequence of the History Channel documentary series "America Unearthed" appeared on one of our local channels, compared to how it's supposed to look (as for why a local channel instead of our regional History Channel, who knows?)
But you'd at least expect that you wouldn't get visuals for a different language than the original, right? Well, here I have two instances of our local channels airing American movies... with French visual localization (!)
Top is All Roads Lead to Rome withCarrie Bradshaw Sarah Jessica Parker, and bottom is Abduction with Twilight's Taylor Lautner (based on the "-tion" suffix, you'd expect the word to already be valid French and not need retranslation... well, yes and no, since the French term doesn't apply to kidnappings)
I only discovered these by chance when I saw a French on-screen caption in these ostensibly American movies (in the case of Rome, subtitles on a phone convo seen above), and the next time I saw them, I made a visual record... In both cases, there's an extra kicker of a detail:
1) In the case of Movie Hits' airing of Abduction, despite the French visuals, the English audio was still aired on the secondary audio track (and there's at least one scene where a shot of English signage gets a French subtitle on screen)
2) In the case of MCOT's airing of Rome, MCOT doesn't do dual-language broadcasts even with movies, which meant the dubbed audio was aired even on the secondary audio track (so I can only assume that the above subtitled scene was originally in Italian)
To finish on an interesting note, more recently I happened to catch the start of an airing of the Jennifer Lopez actioner Parker on another one of our in-house movie channels, which kept the title credits in English... but put a French subtitle on a shot of a sign saying "Ohio State Fair", hmm... (and to muddle matters further, I also later caught a scene of Lopez reading a car dealership email, where no translation was added :-\)
As I've previously posted, the main benefit to dubbing should always be being able to see a work in your own language ... Well, some dubbed versions go the extra mile by also translating the visuals :-) Sometimes it's just the credits, but sometimes, especially for animation, even the visual scenery itself gets translated, which French and Russian traditionally tend to get this extra treatment :-) Here are some examples of Russian localizations of Disney movies...
And here's some localization examples from The Owl House (Russian and German):
Other languages aren't as widely visually localized, but starting with Inside Out, Pixar started expanding its visual localization efforts beyond the usual languages that get the treatment... Here's Anger reading his paper in 6 different languages:
Incidentally, Pixar also rendered alternate textless [or at least, less text] visuals for 2001's Monsters Inc. (and I remember seeing these visuals when my sister watched it on a rental, though subtitles still referenced the original text):
(Taken from this source video)
And some examples comparing my own telesnaps of Thai localizations of Finding Dory and Coco with the original English (and in Dory's case, Russian):
(Yeah, it surprised me that there's even anything to localize in Coco to begin with given the Latino aesthetic, but whatever...)
But with shows and movies that aren't specifically visually localized for your country's language, you'd think that you'd always get the original language visuals by default... right? Well, I've seen some quite bizarre instances where that wasn't the case :-\
Sometimes, the people making the movies or shows provide a version with textless visuals to local distributors, who I assume are then expected to add their own translated text alongside dubbing, but sometimes instead end up just showing the textless visuals as-is (if you're watching a subtitled version, you might get the originally-displayed text translated as a subtitle :-\)... I've seen this on a couple of occasions, usually on local channels, but sometimes even on regional movie channels (usually along the lines of missing subtitles or on-screen text captions, but I also remember seeing Lilo and Stitch on the now-defunct Fox Family Movies, and seeing a shot of a book Lilo is reading that I assume was supposed to say "Magic", except the cover has been blanked out instead) Here's a GIF of how the title sequence of the History Channel documentary series "America Unearthed" appeared on one of our local channels, compared to how it's supposed to look (as for why a local channel instead of our regional History Channel, who knows?)
But you'd at least expect that you wouldn't get visuals for a different language than the original, right? Well, here I have two instances of our local channels airing American movies... with French visual localization (!)
Top is All Roads Lead to Rome with
I only discovered these by chance when I saw a French on-screen caption in these ostensibly American movies (in the case of Rome, subtitles on a phone convo seen above), and the next time I saw them, I made a visual record... In both cases, there's an extra kicker of a detail:
1) In the case of Movie Hits' airing of Abduction, despite the French visuals, the English audio was still aired on the secondary audio track (and there's at least one scene where a shot of English signage gets a French subtitle on screen)
2) In the case of MCOT's airing of Rome, MCOT doesn't do dual-language broadcasts even with movies, which meant the dubbed audio was aired even on the secondary audio track (so I can only assume that the above subtitled scene was originally in Italian)
To finish on an interesting note, more recently I happened to catch the start of an airing of the Jennifer Lopez actioner Parker on another one of our in-house movie channels, which kept the title credits in English... but put a French subtitle on a shot of a sign saying "Ohio State Fair", hmm... (and to muddle matters further, I also later caught a scene of Lopez reading a car dealership email, where no translation was added :-\)
