On my trip Bogotá last month, I brought some heavy duty reading material with me demonstrating my general lack of ambition regarding the Spanish language: Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. “Are you going to review that?” I was asked, jokingly, as though anyone in the Spanish-speaking world had to be told about Harry Potter. 
“Have you read it in English?” someone asked me.
“No.”
“You could read that, and the English version, and then compare the two.”
Blank stares.
“No, I’m just kidding, that would be dumb. Unless there’s a plot difference.”
“Yeah,” I joked. “In the Latin American version, Harry gets a mullet and then dies at the end.”
Oh, but there are cultural differences when some pieces of pop culture get translated. Who knew? Originally appearing in Great Britain, the TV show The Office now has a host of international spin-offs in the U.S., France, Germany, Quebec, and Chile. Yes, I knew that, but the cross-cultural comparisons seem starker than previously pointed out, possibly because the stories have since been given time to develop.
Looking at a Google translation of the German version’s Wikipedia page–admittedly not the best source, but it’ll do until someone wants to pay me to find out–reveals one of the major characters missing from the U.S. version:
Erika Burstedt is due to its corpulent exterior is a popular target of jokes Strombergs. She is competent and a good soul, like on the occasional jokes against Berthold laughs. For many years, with an unfaithful husband, married, is to a flirtation with employees not averse. Erika is a member of the SPD and the trade union and calls to their superiors Stromberg, of which it often was dismissed, again and again of their rights as a worker one. At the end of the third season Erika died from the effects of a heart attack in hospital.
Yes, a woman conscious of workers’ rights with an unfaithful husband dying of a heart attack. Much more like it.
Filed under: Cultural miscellany | Leave a Comment
Tags: Germany, pop culture, television, The Office, translation, tv
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Photo credit: Fran Lebowitz.I like to write about behavior, culture, and technology.
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