jesssepinkman
lancastrien-deactivated20160903

Leonard McCoy’s nickname in other languages

obviously-bored

I grew up knowing that there is a star trek character called Pille. Watching it for the first time in English was so confusing. Cause how the fuck do you go from Bones to Pille?

blueshirtsdoitbest

The translation actually makes sense - at least regarding TOS, where the nickname “Bones” was originally a short version for “Sawbones” which is colloquial for “doctor”. So when they started to air the dubbed episodes of Star Trek TOS in Germany, they translated the meaning of the nickname and called McCoy “Pille” (english: pill) which assumedly is a short version of “Pillendreher” which is .. *drumroll*… German colloquial for “doctor” (It means “Pill-Twister” or “Pill-Spinner”, jokingly referring to somebody who handles a lot of pills and medicine for their job.)

So later, when AOS was on the table, the translated nickname was of course pretty much established within the German fanbase and they kept it for the new movies, although it gets more and more common here to not translate everything for the dubbing but keep particular English terms (especially names, or English words and sayings that have been adopted into common German language use). I guess they just wanted to stay consistent and not confuse the oldschool-fans. (If you ask my parents to tell the Star Trek characters they know, they will say “Spock and Pille”, they probably wouldn’t know who “Bones” is, let alone what “Bones” actually means context-wise.)

Personally I do think that “Bones” just sounds much better/cooler than “Pille” and rolls off the tongue nicely, but I also do think that it’s a pretty decent translation with some thought behind it. And when AOS had Karl Urban as Bones say “The wife took the whole planet in the divorce. All I’ve got left is my bones.”, and thus kind of altered the origination of the nickname (or at least made a nod towards it), they still tried their best to translate the dialogue in a way that gets across what McCoy wants to say about his life but also fits the German version of the nickname. So they had him say “The wife took the whole planet in the divorce. That was a bitter pill to swallow.”, having a noticeable nod to the Pill-nickname. I thought it was a good job to do it this way.
(Even though it’s always the best to watch movies without the dubbing and with their original voices, of course! But not everybody does speak English well enough to understand everything, so it’s good to have decent dubbing. And I prefer good dubbing to subtitles, because I want to watch the movie and not simultaneously have to read the movie. I’m bad at multitasking with the eyes.)

Source: lancastrien-deactivated20160903#I am Vulcan sir. We embrace queues
9 years ago with 2,083 notes