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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

You know what multi-million movie has a translation that isn't total crap? Frozen. They really put resources into that. You can look up random Disney songs on Youtube in different languages, and then look up the Frozen songs, and you can sort of tell that they've done a better job even if you don't speak the language.

Even relatively obscure languages like Dutch where they usually just watch English-language movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY

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I agree. Frozen, and other Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks children movies (like Shrek) tend to be of awesome quality in all languages. But I attribute this to the fact that those movies are not translated - they're being localized, which by definition requires much more work and paying much closer attention.

Not to mention that the context of each line of dialogue is pretty close to unambiguous since you have the source material right in front of you for a movie. I imagine it's still a huge job, but has to be more enjoyable that translating/localizing for us asshole programmers and our magic translation strings.

That's why I say some translators seem not to bother even watching movies they're working on. Otherwise they wouldn't make such stupid mistakes.

The Latin American Spanish localization of Dreamworks's Shrek is a great example.

They brought in Eugenio Derbez, a Mexican comedian, to voice Donkey (voiced in English by Eddie Murphy). Donkey in particular speaks in colloquialisms and pop culture references with wordplay, so Derbez wrote a bunch of new lines and jokes that referenced Latin American colloquialisms and pop culture.

Children learn different fairy tales in different countries, so they also managed to change the identity of some of the characters without changing their appearances (and without altering video at all, just audio).

Exactly. I mentioned Shrek for a reason. It was (and still is) hugely popular in my country (Poland), and one of the reasons for that is the deep localization. They replaced original jokes and pop culture references with local ones.

@daxelrod: Wow, thanks for that. Quite interesting. I always wondered about how that was done and if it was a direct conversion of sorts but I guess it's not. Very interesting.

I just have to ask: How do you know this?

All of this information comes from the teacher of a Spanish class I took (we watched the Latin American version of Shrek in the class). I wish I had some more tangible sources to cite.

EDIT: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0220240/otherworks: "Jeffrey Katzenberg and Dreamworks allowed [Eugenio Derbez] not only to dub Donkey's voice, but to translate and adapt the script of "Shrek" and "Shrek 2" to make it more appealing to Latin America"

I also remember that the Gingerbread Man was one of the characters who was altered, but I don't remember the name of the Latin American replacement.

Gingerbread Man is translated as "El Hombre de Jengibre", which was previously unknown to Spanish speaking children.

What was relocalized was the Muffin Man nursery rhyme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muffin_Man), which was substituted by Pinpon's ronda song:

Pinpon is a puppet very handsome and made out of cardboard. He washes his little face with soap and water. He untangles his hair with an ivory comb. And in spite of the hair pulling he cries not nor even winces.

Ah! Thank you, you're absolutely right, I misremembered the character.

I remember the Hindi translation of Aladdin getting a bunch of critical acclaim too

Nitpick: Shrek is a Dreamworks Animation movie.

Thanks. Updated the comment.

I don't watch this type of movies often so I tend to bundle them together into "Pixareque" category in my mind ;).

If, by analogy, the visuals of a movie musical are the "backend" and the audio is the "frontend," then what these localizers do is the equivalent of completely redesigning the entire frontend. Dubbed musicals have an incredible number of constraints in terms of number of syllables, scansion, etc., so the script translators need to be given a tremendous amount of leeway and creative freedom. They're basically lyricists in their own right, in a world where everything's composed melody-first!

In software, this would translate to localization coders being able to (and having the talent to) rewrite the entire frontend logic. And if your software product is going to make multi-millions in new markets by virtue of feeling like it's translated natively, it might be worth retaining native-speaker coder(s) to maintain a branch that parallels (and consistently merges in) your master branch, and rewrites display logic as it comes in. I'd imagine the Googles of the world do exactly this.

Disney generally spend a lot of effort on the translations.

Idina Menzel, who voiced Elsa also plays the lead in the Broadway musical Wicked. Several translations of Frozen use an actress for Elsa who played the lead in a localized version of Wicked.

For Big Hero 6 we also translated and replaced all of the Japanese text in San Fransokyo with Chinese and Korean for the Chinese and Korean markets. By "text" I mean all of the CG signs, posters, and environmental set dressing in the actual movie (not just the dialogue).

We literally had to re-render the entire movie for each translation. Disney Animation takes these translations very seriously :-)

To be honest, I thought the Dutch translation was relatively awkward (I have to admit I've only heard the Dutch "Let It Go" version, not the rest of the movie). I thought the Flemish version was much nicer, despite some Flemish phrasing sounding off as Dutch...

(For those wondering: Flemish is the Belgian variant of Dutch.) And i agree.. i also prefer the Flemish dubbed voices. For example, Timon&Pumba in The Lion King are Flemish, to great effect.

Because Kids (and Disney)

High-end kids movies are usually localized carefully, including songs, etc (there's a YT video with snippets of all the versions)

And of course they don't split the movie into phrases and make them translate one by one

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