Alloooo,
We've been out and about this week with trips to Michelle and Vinicius' for esfihas on Friday, down the road for more esfihas with the Zona Norte massive on Saturday, and a road trip to wine country on Sunday for a birthday lunch for Zila and Edson, crammed with sizzling artichokes. Next weekend we ride to Ilha Grande, which should be fun.
I have made a new compilation, and my phrase of the week comes from a pet peeve nurtured over many an evening browsing Brazilian Netflix - basically, the titles of most foreign films are translated into Portuguese in an astoundingly literal way, removing any kind of intrigue and blurring everything together into even more of a generic mush than Netflix originally intended.
Transliterating film titles is tricky, considering differences in cultural references and norms. But it seems to me that in this age of streaming platforms you should either stick with the original title and let the synopsis do the heavy lifting, or go for broke and at least come up with some amusingly off-the-wall translations. There are some
amazing examples of this from around the world, which I refuse to fact-check on IMDb for fear of spoiling the fun; hats off to the Chinese in particular for translating "Fargo" as "Mysterious Murder in Snowy Cream", and "Free Willy" as "A Very Powerful Whale Runs to Heaven".
When it comes to Brazil, though, I can only assume that there is one overworked and irreversibly jaded guy in charge of translating every film title (I will call him Translator Man), because the end results tend to have a very distinct air of "will-this-do?" about them.
So "Pulp Fiction" is "
Tempo de Violência" ("Time of Violence"), "Mulholland Drive" is "
Cidade dos Sonhos" ("City of Dreams" - which achieves the impressive double-whammy of spoilering the film while also misleading innocent couples into thinking it's some kind of romantic comedy), "All About Eve" is "
A Malvada" ("The Baddie") and, perhaps worst of all, "The Godfather" is "
O Poderoso Chefão" ("The Big Powerful Boss" which, although technically accurate, could apply just as well to
this.)
Sometimes it's pretty obvious that Translator Man hasn't watched the film in question - i.e. "Momento", which is translated as "Amnésia" despite the protagonist repeatedly pointing out that he doesn't have amnesia. Meanwhile, the rare misguided stabs at innovation result in a mess of subtitles and redundancies - i.e. "Airplane" > "Fasten Your Seatbelts, The Pilot Has Gone Missing" or "Rat Race" > "Everyone's Gone Crazy! - The Race for Million$" - suggesting that maybe making every title as bland as possible is actually the best-case scenario here.
What really irks is that very occasionally - like a stopped clock telling the right time twice a day - Translator Man actually improves on the original title. "Inside Out" was released here as "
Divertida Mente", which is a play on words between "
divertidamente" ("amusingly"!) and "
divertida mente" ("a fun mind"). The pun probably gets Lost in Translation (which is called
"Meetings and Failures in Meetings" here, by the way) but I thought it worked quite well. (Pixar-related aside: "Coco" was hastily renamed "
Viva" here because "
cocô" means "poo", which probably wouldn't work for a nationwide ad campaign).
Similarly, "The Hangover" became "Se Beber, Não Case!" ("Don't Drink and Marry!"), which unfortunately inspired a legion of similar titles but is still better than the rather nondescript English title; not to mention the French version, "Very Bad Trip". "A Ressaca", Portuguese for "The Hangover", is the translated title for "Hot Tub Time Machine", obviously.
I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make, really. Maybe that someone should check in on Translator Man, and make sure he's not being held against his will? Or that he should either leave things be, or go utterly insane and aim to emulate, say, Thailand translating "Little Fockers" as "Zany Son-in-Law, Zippy Grandkids, Sour Father-in-Law".
Speak to you soon!
Fred of State
