marcusmarcusrc

Luciernaga means Firefly in Spanish, apparently.

Weirdly, the spanish subtitles on Firefly are only loosely correlated with the spanish dubbing. My theory (developed by attempting to not only hold both the spoken and written forms in my head simultaneously, but attempting to make a best guess at the original English by lipreading, which I have no actual skill at) is that the subtitles were closer to direct translations of the English, while the dubbing was an attempt to translate in such a way as to be more natural dialogue, but also to be closer to matching the lip movements (so where a translation of a short english sentence yields a long spanish sentence, they would try to find a short spanish equivalent).

An example of a more direct translation versus a natural one:
Presumed English: "Captain Mal - bad - that's from the latin"
Subtitle: "Mal - malo - eso es del latin"
Dubbed "Mal - malo - no confio en ese hombre" (I don't trust that man)

Because in Spanish the connection from Mal to "malo" is rather obvious and River wouldn't need to make an allusion to the latin.

Also, 15 year old in-jokes are even less comprehensible to outsiders after they are awkwardly translated into Spanish than they were in the original English. Yay for 15 year old in-jokes!

Anyway, that is the Spanish Firefly report of the night. Any errors in transcription, translation, and theorizing are solely my responsibility, and not that of any of the people I was watching with. Any insights can be credited to them of course.