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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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 ;).

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