User:WaltK/Sandbox 4

Doctor Who is a worldwide franchise. It has been exported to over 200 territories, and localised into various languages.

To the best of my knowledge, these localisations largely remain as faithful to the original English writing as possible; it's nowhere near being a 4kids anime-type situation where entire stories and characterisations are changed, everything in that regard is the same among all regions and tongues.

But when it comes to minutia, y'know, the stuff this very wiki is outright infamous for covering (among other things), things get complicated. Very complicated.

The thing with foreign translations of works is that not everything can be understood universally. Thematic connections and meanings can get lost, puns and wordplay may be unworked, and cultural references may need to change. Hell, some lines have been known to change purely for the sake of it sometimes!

Peddling back to that penultimate point up there - about the cultural references - one such reference happens to be the subject of one particular article we have on here; in the Brazilian Portuguese dub of The Ghost Monument, the video game that Ryan Sinclair name drops is changed from Call of Duty to, for some reason, GoldenEye 007.

This is presently the only reference the wiki makes to a foreign dub's localisation change, which leads to what we're debating:

Should this page be allowed on the site to begin with, and should further info from foreign dubs/translations of Who media be allowed as a valid information?

I, personally, am very much of the opinion that they shouldn't be, due to the simple fact that it would make things on this wiki more complicated than they already are.

There are just way too many variables to consider; different dubs can interpret certain aspects of stories in several different ways, some things get rewritten to account for, and even draw attention to the fact that the characters are now (seemingly) speaking an entirely different language, etc.

In many dubs, the fact that Amy Pond's surname is the word for a body of water needs additional explanation, for obvious reasons.

In the French dub of The Poison Sky, the Tenth Doctor's humorous reference to The Empty Child while wearing a gas mask ("are you my mummy?") becomes a mere reiteration of his dislike for guns.

The Czech dub of Asylum of the Daleks, apparently, makes the baffling decision to call Oswin's soufflé's "baked ice cream", leading to several "dub-induced plotholes" (to quote TVTropes) down the line.

… Now, there are some unique cases that I'd still consider an exception to a hypothetical "no material from foreign translations" rule, one being media that originated in a non-English speaking medium, such as the recently-discovered  Daleks, invasión a la Tierra año 2150, the Argentinian Spanish comic adaptation of Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.

I might - emphasis on might - also be willing to concede to Doctor Who auf Deutsch, a German-language recording of The Tenth Doctor Adventures, a co-production between Big Finish and Lübbe Audio that was officially distributed in English-speaking regions, being allowed.

But otherwise, I believe dub and localisation changes should be reserved for BtS sections, if at all. This relates to my secondary proposal to create a series of "Doctor Who around the world" pages keeping such info contained in those pages, but that's a subject for another temp thread.

… That's my opinion on the matter. I'll allow you guys to debate for yourselves. Onward!
 * WaltK ☎