this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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Anime

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Anime is hand-drawn and computer animation originating from Japan.

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So I often wonder about japanes cultural things in anime and especially since I watch dubbed (increasingly bad eyesight has made subbed a non starter). Anyway there is a love is ware episode that revolves around a character finding the word wiener funny but it sorta makes me wonder because in english we have that but I would assume other languages would not have the same stuff. At one point too a character is trying to get another to say it by asking another name for hotdogs or for dashhounds. It just makes me wonder if there are real analogues in japanese around this or do the writers have to decide on a different cultural thing for the joke to be around. Anyone know about this? On a side note there is the whole thing of people calling them by their last names and it makes me think about everyone walking around referring to each other like they are a student in their gym class. I wonder how prevalent using the last name actually is.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Translation is always a bit of a balancing act. If you translate literally you may lose the jokes, and to keep the same vibe you may need to go for something that's not a literal translation.

One example that comes to my mind is in FLCL there's a line in the dub about a store that still has Crystal Pepsi, however i the original Japanese it's a different discontinued soda. The translators made the call that almost no one outside of Japan would be familiar with the original soda, and that it wasn't really that brand itself that was funny, it was that this store was still selling a soda that was discontinued like a decade ago.

I feel like the weiner/hot dog/dachshund joke is probably pretty universal, it's a pretty simple sort of visual pun- dachshunds look like a hot dog (or maybe a sausage in countries that don't eat a lot of hot dogs) and hot dogs are pretty phallic, I suspect that pretty much every culture and language has similar kinds of jokes that translate pretty well. Maybe in some cases you swap out hot dog for kielbasa or salami or whatever the local tube-shaped meat product is and the accompanying local slang, but overall the joke isn't much deeper than "lol, penises are funny and these things look like a dick"

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

One interesting part is at one point there is a line that in the us they call them sausage dogs and im like. whhhaaaattt!? Then whats funny is I think about all the regional things in the us and actually im not totally sure that might be a thing somewhere.