User:WaltK/Sandbox 4

Restarting a discussion from the old forums. Such fun!

I'll start by drawing attention to the page that started this debate to begin with: GoldenEye 007.

Our in-universe information for the classic James Bond video game tie-in is that Ryan Sinclair made a reference to playing the game during the events of "O Monumento Fantasma"… known in English as The Ghost Monument. What we have here is a piece of information from a foreign language dub/localisation of an official work (the Brazilian dub, to be precise): Ryan mentions it instead of Call of Duty, as he does in the English dub.

It's presently the only such page on the site as far as I can see. And I don't like it.

"You… think there should be more?" You're probably thinking. No. Nonononono. There should be less. I don't think this kind of information should be anywhere near our in-universe articles. And I will do my best to explain why I think that is.

There are way too many variables
Doctor Who is popular worldwide, being exported to over 200 different countries, many of those countries being non-English speaking, warranting tons of foreign dubs to be created. And that's fantastic. The more fans who can access this wonderful franchise, the better.

But here's the thing: it's impossible for foreign dubs and localisations to be one-to-one recreations of the English material. Lines might be rewritten to be better understood in the chosen language, cultural references can be changed, hell, things can change purely for the sake of change sometimes! And each and every dub does these things differently.

Going back to our presently one and only documented example: in the Brazilian dub of The Ghost Monument, Ryan mentions GoldenEye 007 instead of Call of Duty, leading to the in-universe documentation to cite the dub line as another source, as we do with contradicting media. But let's say a different foreign dub changes it to yet another game, or changes the line outright so Ryan isn't even making a game reference anymore. How do we catalogue that?

How about localisation quirks? Are we going to update the TARDIS page to include every alternative acronym?

How about the fact that, "by some accounts", the fact that Amy Pond's surname is also the word for a body of water has to be explained every time it's relevant.

Or how the Tenth Doctor, by most accounts, liked to say "allons-y", except for one where he liked to say "", and how, instead of wanting to someday say "allons-y, Alonso", he wanted to say "mairô, Milo".

What about blatantly incorrect dubisms? Is it a valid fact that, by one account (or the Czech dub), the very clearly soufflé-looking dish Oswin was making in Asylum of the Daleks was actually "baked ice cream"?

The very fact that the different dubs inevitably have the characters speaking in different languages might also have to be a factor. Do we talk about how, by a bunch of alternate accounts, all of the Doctor's UK-hailing companions actually speak to each other in perfect French instead of their native English? "We can just ignore that" you might be thinking. But then, we'd need an explanation for why the French versions of the characters have to explain what the English word "pond" means, as I alluded to above.

Does any of this sound doable to you? Like, in the slightest?

It's irrelevant to our readership
If you're reading our articles on this wiki, then there's a pretty good chance that you're a fluent English speaker who engages with the DWU in its original English language. It would be rather counterproductive of you to frequent this site as opposed to one of our many foreign language counterparts if you don't have at least a loose grasp of the English language.

If your first, native language is, lets say, French, then you're probably watching televised Doctor Who either via its official French dub, or in its original English with French subtitles. As such, if you're looking for information from a dedicated Who database, then you're going to get a better bang for you buck with the French Doctor Who Wiki.

The same logic would apply if you're bilingual: "I want information on the English side" - come here. And so on.

Now, you could argue that nothing on the wiki is necessarily relevant to every reader. We get people coming here for information on televised Who, with no interest in the various audios, novels and stuff. But what matters is that we have any information at the ready for anybody to access on the media that your average reader will have easy access to.

more to come