Milk Chan is fantastic, because it’s just so goddamned weird. The US opening tells you everything you need to know.
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He sounds rather generic dumb, not American. He´s much funnier in English. To be honest, as much praise as the German dub gets sometimes, the original is far better overall i.m.o. A lot of jokes get lost, or are translated literally and lose their meaning in German.
The German voices of the main cast are brilliant. The translation, meanwhile, is pretty dreadful, to the point where sometimes they end up talking complete gibberish.
Maybe.
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No, they just messed him up in the German translation.
The “original” Arnold Schwarzenegger is three times as funny in his “native” German than he is when speaking English, so they could have had a lot of fun there.
When speaking German, Arnie still resorts to a strong regional dialect of Austrian German (Styrian, to be exact); however, he has been living in America for a long time, and he speaks it with a strong American accent. Way stronger than his Austrian accent is when he speaks English. As local dialects are not usually taught as a second language and are thus never ever spoken with an American accent, this ends up sounding very… funny.
But no, Mr. Wolfcastle mostly just sounds just like a regular German dumb guy…
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We tried to watch it once, but gave up in bafflement about 10 minutes in.
Yup. I remember an old episode where Sideshow Bob sings about “dreams of gouging out [Bart’s] eyes” and it’s translated to “dreams twinkling in his eyes”. I can only assume that the translation is done by some semiliterate intern.
I wonder how they handled the side show bob line "No! It’s German, for “the Bart, the.”
“Any man who speaks German cant be bad.”
Or you could be right. And Japan is insane.
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Also, in Germany, Ralph has a housekeeper who is never seen and cleans house in the nude…
They did nothing special. He just says “Nein, das ist Deutsch und heißt ‘Die Bart, die’”. Which is just as well, because there’s no winning with this one – the words are right there on screen.
I’m convinced that it’s really a function of the time the translators have to devote to each episode. They just write down the first thing that comes to mind and has sufficiently passable syntax before having to move on. Poor sods. (Although the eye-gouging may have been removed due to concerns about content, who knows?)
I remember them saying this on QI (tho it is frequently wrong) - according to Stephen Fry, he sounds like the German equivalent of someone from Zomerzeeett.
(ETA: that’s three short 'e’s for all you Colonials)
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