Not Bloody Likely
The first production of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion was performed in Vienna. I've known this for years, but it only just hit me: how ever did they translate it?
The plot, of course, has Eliza Doolittle dropping her cockney and learning to speak with an upper class British accent. How was this represented in German?
Indeed the play has been popular around the world, which means translators have been scratching their heads in a lot of languages.
I've seen foreign plays where accent and dialect matter--Aristophanes comes to mind. And I've always felt I was missing something. But Pygmalion is so language-specific, I have to wonder how it can work at all in non-English-speaking productions.
The plot, of course, has Eliza Doolittle dropping her cockney and learning to speak with an upper class British accent. How was this represented in German?
Indeed the play has been popular around the world, which means translators have been scratching their heads in a lot of languages.
I've seen foreign plays where accent and dialect matter--Aristophanes comes to mind. And I've always felt I was missing something. But Pygmalion is so language-specific, I have to wonder how it can work at all in non-English-speaking productions.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:16 AM
2 Comments:
My daughter recently watched a French-dubber version of The Grinch. She said it didn't translate very well. No Karloff, very few rhymes. The one good thing, she said, was that they left the songs alone.
That's "dubbed", btw.
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