Nice overview!
I have a beef with German movie/show/episode titles anyway. They have a knack for stupid translations, titles making no sense at all, using a different title when absolute unnecessary or use English titles but not the originals. In German “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” became “The Return of the First Avenger” – that English title, no German translation, no kidding. The Heat they retitled as “Taffe Mädels” (Tough Girlies), very funny.
I disagree with my fellow countrypeople or German speakers on here, sorry, I find most of the German titles bad.
The problem I have is, that titles are often not some random something, but the writers choose titles with a reason, an that too often gets lost in the German titles. At least they should try to hit the tone of the original titles and not come up with some free interpretations of their own, titles sadly enough sometimes proving, they don’t even have much of an idea what an episode is about. There might be shows, where writers don’t put thought in their titles, but I think OUaT is not one of them.
“High Price for Gold” is a bad blunder IMO, not getting the tone of the original title nor getting the essence of the episode. Why not keep “7:15am”, it’s not like we have a different time system in Germany.. Changing “Skin Deep” to “The Beauty and the Beast” takes away the poetry of the orginal title, “Oberflächlich” (= skin deep) would have had so much more implied. “Verträumt” would have been a better fit for “Dreamy”. “A Mothers Feelings” is just so annoying German and totally ignorant, that the title is a reference to the Arthurian legend. “The Malicious World of the Queen” for “Evil Queen” made me spill my coffee, why so complicate? The title for “Nasty Habits” is just as stupid and ignorant to the intention of the writers as it can get, at least they could have made is simple and used “Song of the Pied Piper” (Das Lied des Rattenfängers). “Outsider” was twisted to “On the Border”, well, yeah, guess German nature is somewhat borderline, so might explain that choice. And okay, “Red Handed” is pretty hard to translate in a good way in this case, but nevertheless “Auf frischer Tat” (what red handed means in German) would have been still the better title.
A few are decent, and a few even rather good. Although “Fluch der Freiheit” would have done it (why the “new” in the title?). “Butterfly effect” for “Stableboy” had something, and “Curse and Reconciliation” even more, reminding at least me of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” (Schuld und Sühne).
But really, I have no clue why we can’t do to one word titles in German, “Crocodile’s Wrath”, “Doctor from another land”, “Dream of Tallahassee”… oh, please. This is not a contest for cheesy poetry. There seem to be some unwritten rule, that German titles can’t be just one word or so. We never can make anything simple, short and catchy is nothing for our deep going intellectual and sentimental German minds. LOL
And don’t get me started about the habit of dubbing in Germany. It drives me at times up the walls. See one actor act but hear another one act, and it’s not just at times rather stupid interpretations and even mistakes in translation, it’s the acting, voice is a part of it, for crying out loud. Not to mention that they sometimes choose voices totally not fitting. Additional it can be very irritating to see different actors with the same voice on screen, I do pay attention to voices.
Biggest fun I had was recently the movie “Her”, which I watched in original English (Scarlett Johansson was brilliant) and then in German because of friends. The German version was at best only half as good, and nothing against the German actress giving her voice, Luise Helm, but it meant, there was no Scarlett Johansson in the German Version despite that she was listed in the credits of course, what a joke.
The German dubbed version of OUaT is terrible IMO. The voices are pretty much all a pitch too high, and the really flat sound they seem to prefer in Germany makes it even worse. Snow sounds like a kid, David has no character, Emma sometimes squeaks like a teenager. Somehow have the impressions they thought it is for children’s program. And Regina, well, no commentary, Lana Parrilla’s voice work gets lost of course.
Found a German trailer for the season 02, so a little taste of the German voices
I think the most humorous international episode title so far has to be “Green Is the New Black” for the German version of “New York City Serenade.”
Yeah, hilarious. We Germans have humor, surprise. Although I wonder where that came from, maybe a secret fan of the Netflix show (Netflix just came to Germany though). Despite that the German title has not much to do with the episode, but who cares, it fits the last minutes.
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