Overseas Edits

[bloodteller]

has anyone else ever wondered what changes are made to the Red Dwarf episodes when they are dubbed or edited for overseas airing? there was quite a good TOS article a while back about the Czech dubs/subs of the episodes and their differences to the original (small off-duty tasmanian traffic warden, 14 year old wife etc.) and there’s a G&T article about how edited-down the Japanese versions of the episodes are. the titles for all of the episodes seem to be different in Japan too- for example, Justice is called Rimmer’s Sin And Punishment and Quarantine is called Holovirus Of Terror. with that in mind, does anyone know of any other interesting changes made to the episodes in different countries?

[Plastic Percy]

It wasn’t for overseas broadcasting, but edits were made to remove Lister’s virginity story and mentions of the jailbait ball girl in ‘Gunmen of the Apocalypse’, due to Craig Charles being charged with rape at the time.

[Pete Part Three]

McNugget

[bloodteller]

some more of the japanese episode titles, because i find it interesting how altered they are (although in some cases i presume they have to be? there’s no japanese word for polymorph, surely)

Kryten- Nice To Meet You, Sorrowful Android

Meltdown- The Greatest Operation In History

Emohawk: Polymorph 2- The Bride Is A Beauty And A Beast

Epideme- Shut Up, Talkative Virus!

Pete:Part 1- Those Mischief Makers on Floor 13

Fathers And Suns- I Am My Father And My Father is Me

the epideme re-titling is interesting because that’s exactly what i was thinking when watching the episode, oddly enough. (also if someone wants to correct me on these, feel free. i got them off japanese wikipedia so for all i know someone could’ve put them there for a laugh)

[Pete Part Three]

Timeslides – The Photo Portal to Yesteryear

[Ben Saunders]

>Shut Up, Talkative Virus!
That is an extremely pithy review of the episode.

[bloodteller]

Demons & Angels- Devils And Angels: Our Two Faces

Psirens- The Temptation Of The Evil Sirens

Holoship- Love In A Hologram Paradise

Marooned- Friendship Falling On A Snowy Planet

Nanarchy- The Dwarf’s Micro-Miracle

red dwarf must’ve been one of the hardest programs to translate in any country, i guess? considering a lot of the titles are based around puns that only work in english, and there’s no real other-language version of “smeg” so i suppose changing the titles is a necessity.

i wonder what they’ll call timewave when it’s translated?

[Pete Part Three]

Future Echoes – Visions Of The Yet To Come
Dear Dave – A letter from a lover
Legion – We are many
Pete Part 2 – One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing
Terrorform – Help, We are stuck in Rimmer’s Mind!
The Inquisitor – The Nasty Robot

[bloodteller]

Future Echoes is actually “The Future Came Too Soon” and Dear Dave is “With Love, From Earth”. dunno what the others are as i can’t be arsed to translate them all.

[Pete Part Three]

This Japanese>English dictionary I’ve just pulled out of my arse is worthless, then?

[bloodteller]

how did you fit a whole dictionary inside your anus?

[Pete Part Three]

Lube and determination.

[Dave]

Confidence and Paranoia – Lube and Determination

[Ben Saunders]

Wow, some of those Japanese titles are poetic. I love “Friendship Falls on a Snowy Planet”

[Ben Saunders]

One of our Dinosaurs is Missing is fucking funnier than any in the episode

[bloodteller]

unfortunately i think that was a joke, its actually “Our Bird’s Become A Dinosaur” which i suppose is a pretty accurate summary of the episode

[bloodteller]

Better Than Life is “The Gift Of A Nightmare Game”

Duct Soup is a difficult one but it translates the most sensically as “Lost Path Of Love and Jealousy”

[bloodteller]

i don’t know if sensically is a word

[Warbodog]

Backwards’ Bulgarian jokes wouldn’t work in Bulgarian. What’s Bulgaria’s Bulgaria?

[Moonlight]

Japanese Inquisitor cuts the entire sequence with the alternate Lister including the scene where they unlock the door, but retains the final punchline for Lister reveals the severed hand. So in that version the episode ends with Lister inexplicably brandishing a severed hand completely out of the blue.

[Pete Part Three]

Take a Red Dwarf title, plug it into Google Translate for the country of your choice, and then translate back to English.

Sticking with Japanese, “Back to Reality” becomes “In the Case of Cancer”.

And that’s so depressing it’s put me off this little game.

[bloodteller]

presumably that’s why none of the japanese episode titles are literal translations of the english ones. people would get the whole wrong idea about the show

[International Debris]

Didn’t people use to call it Babelwhacking or something? Using the notoriously bad translation site Babelfish. Stick a phrase through four or five languages and then back into English again and see what nonsense comes out.

The most fun is by putting in one word repeated several times, because then the mistranslation becomes completely unfathomable. I did it a couple of weeks back, and found that:
‘Pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs’ becomes ‘Bruce product news and so on’
‘Astonishment’ (x15) becomes ‘Number of tables on the table’
‘Sausage’ (x20) becomes ‘Write this European championship’

[Flap Jack]

This Google Translate game is WILD:

“Back to Reality” becomes “Return to Reality”

“Timewave” becomes “Time Wave”

“Future Echoes” becomes “Future Echo”

“Skipper” becomes “Star Knot”

[Plastic Percy]

<<red dwarf must’ve been one of the hardest programs to translate in any country, i guess? considering a lot of the titles are based around puns that only work in english, and there’s no real other-language version of “smeg” so i suppose changing the titles is a necessity.>>

If it helps, when dubbed into Czech they replace it with “Do kosmu”, which translates as “into the cosmos!”. In the Czech language, nobody says “oh shit”, instead they say “into the ass!” as a common expletitive.

Also, with the line of “small, off-duty Czechoslovakian Traffic Warden” they keep it the same but just switch it to Tasmanian.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

How does is Taiwan Tony portrayed in, well, any Asian country? Do they have a racist stereotype of of their own foreign fast food chefs that they use?

Or does Father’s and Son’s come across as a really well meaning western social commentary on the racism Asian expats encounter, to the Asian audience?

[bloodteller]

the japanese title for Out Of Time is The Great Fight For Our Future, which is quite a nice title i think. i like how even though the japanese titles are more literal, they still have the intrigue of the original.

>when dubbed into Czech they replace it with “Do kosmu”, which translates as “into the cosmos!”. In the Czech language, nobody says “oh shit”, instead they say “into the ass!” as a common expletitive.

see that’s interesting, that they’ve still come up with an equivalent for “smeg” and not just used their country’s swear words. when watching one japanese episode they used the word “kuso” in place of smeg which more or less means “shit” if i’m remembering correctly. i’d be interested to see what every country’s version of smeg was because since it’s a made up word you would have to make up a word/phrase in your own language, or just use an existing swear word from the language when translating it.

[Ben Saunders]

Some of the Japanese names for Spyro the Dragon levels are pretty good.

Toasty – Wonder Pumpkin
Peace Keepers – Combat Garden Home
Doctor Shemp – Doctor Cool
Blowhard – Hurricane Hat
Tree Tops – Speed Tree
Jacques – Amazing Box
Glimmer – Glimland
Crystal Glacier – Minus Lands
Breeze Harbour – Float Port
Zephyr – Slime Ranch

[Flap Jack]

What is “Death? It’s like being on holiday with a group of Germans.” in German? A reference to a different nationality I assume, but which one? I know that Uter from The Simpsons is Swiss in the German version, so maybe it’s a similar deal?

[bloodteller]

>Backwards’ Bulgarian jokes wouldn’t work in Bulgarian. What’s Bulgaria’s Bulgaria?

i tried looking this up but there doesn’t seem to be any bulgarian subtitles for the show. or rather, there is but there’s only fan-made ones for The End. so i guess bulgarian translators never got round to it?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

All they did with the Bulgarian release was re-dub the vocal track backwards so they could understand it. No translation necessary.

[Pete Part Three]

They’re Bulgarians. They have very simple tastes.

[Warbodog]

>All they did with the Bulgarian release was re-dub the vocal track backwards so they could understand it. No translation necessary.

I nominate this borderline racist remark for Hall of Fame status.

[Ian Symes]

They’re Bulgarians. They have very simple tastes.

We got one or two angry replies from Bulgarians for tweeting this during Eurovision.

[cwickham]

On a very, very vaguely related manner, does anyone happen to have a picture of what the title for Parallel Universe looked like on the VHS?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Are you talking about the VHS cover?

[cwickham]

No, the VHS had the episode’s title superimposed over the beginning since it was originally broadcast without it. I’d just like to know how it looked.

[Pete Part Three]

Um, just the regular blocky red typeface (taking up the entire screen) that appeared for the rest of the episodes in Series II, but it appeared during the swoop under the ship a couple of seconds in.

My videos are long gone, I’m afraid.

[cwickham]

I was just wondering if they’d gone to the trouble of making sure it fitted with the rest of the series, or if it looked like some of the title sequences for the old Doctor Who VHSes back when they edited serials into one big movie (i.e. crap).

[genericnerdyusername]

It fit with the rest of the series.

[MANI506]

To be fair BBC video did a great job of making it seem like the title was always there. Red Dwarf II Byte 2 was my first VHS because my off air series 2 was missing Parallel Universe.

[Moonlight]

I just bought the entire run of Red Dwarf (minus Series VIII) plus Smeg Ups and Smeg Outs on VHS.

[bloodteller]

>(minus Series VIII)

is that because you don’t like VIII, or because it’s somewhat harder to find on VHS than the other series?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I remember when series 6 was the difficult one to get a hold of. Late 90s early 00s before the DVDs came out (and even after they had started to be released) then the BBC had stopped producing the VHS I was hunting high and low for all of them and series 6 was gold dust. Everyone at every bootsale and charity shop would always have 3 copies of series 2 byte 2 or something daft but no 6 … finally tracked them down but it took forever.

Days before the internet made it possible to buy anything from anyone anywhere were wild man I tell you, WILD!

[bloodteller]

thank god that we have eBay these days, eh? it’s brilliant to be able to just type in what you want and find+buy it right away.

[Ben Saunders]

I’m glad I had them all on off-air recordings my dad made on VHS. I always thought they were recordings of the original broadcast, until the Terrorform/Copacabana debacle blew my world wide open, they must have been repeats, at least some of them

[Hamish]

Interestingly enough my brother actually did find a VHS of the Smeg Ups tape just sitting on the shelf at a Value Village in Edmonton about a month ago.

Strangest thing though was finding a copy of Dark Ages on VHS from the Wabamun Seniors Thrift Store. Rural thrifts stores are awesome, at least in Alberta.

[International Debris]

Finding VHS tapes in charity shops is pretty much impossible in the UK these days, nowhere will take them because nobody buys them.

[Warbodog]

Series V byte 1 felt the hardest to find in the “the only available Red Dwarf is the worst Red Dwarf” era (VII, VIII, Remastered), because I was desperate to see the legendary Back to Reality. I found most of the others for rent at Blockbuster and school, then found Smeg Ups second hand and watched it loads because it was the only glimpse of “best Red Dwarf” (IV-VI) I had. A sad case.

[Plastic Percy]

I remember buying an awesome VHS doublepack of Smeg Ups and Smeg Outs from the Virgin Megastore in Watford. Glory days.

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