• FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    7 days ago

    I have a friend who is Swedish, and my all time favorite isn’t a movie, but a comic book. Batman translated into Läderlappen. So after some discussion about that period in time and how things were being translated I asked, well then what did Robin translate to, and he looked at me and said “Robin”. I almost fell out of my chair. So he brought me a copy of Läderlappen and Robin. I love it.

    • norimee@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      6 days ago

      That’s so funny. I just though Läderlappen just sounds like german for “leather rag” and google does in fact translates it to “The Leather patch”.

      I wonder what their thought process was in coming up with leather patch for batman.

      • FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        7 days ago

        I am not sure, but to tie this all back together, the whole conversation came up when we were talking about how, when you kill a bat in Valheim it drops leather.

      • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        6 days ago

        So “läderlapp” is an old Swedish slang or colloquialism for bat. Back in the 50s when Batman was first brought to Sweden English literacy was a lot worse than it is now, and translating titles and names were much more common. A direct translation of Batman would be “fladdermusmannen” - which is a very unwieldy name - so they settled for a then-more-common slang for “the bat”. It does sound a little better, though it would have been best to just do what finally happened from the 80s and let Batman remain untranslated.