La Cazavampiros

So, as I think I've mentioned here already, I finally got my Season Three Buffy discs, and I got a start on watching them last night (in fact, this is what I was doing instead of the laundry). Because I have a slightly odd sense of what's entertaining, at one point I switched over to the Spanish dub and re-watched bits of "Dead Man's Party" (that's the episode with the zombies).

And an interesting experiment this was. I suppose the voices aren't too bad... It's really strange at first hearing everybody speaking in somebody else's voice, but you kind of get used to it after a while. And the actress dubbing Buffy actually does sound a bit like SMG.

But as for what those voices are actually saying... Alas, even my rusty high school Spanish is enough to be able to tell that the quirky Buffy dialog does not translate well.

An example:

Buffy is trying to talk Willow into going to the Bronze with her.
English: "Friends don't let friends Bronze alone."
Spanish: "Friends don't abandon each other."

Yawn!

Then there's the bit where Xander and the gang have taken Buffy to see Giles for the first time since she got back after skipping town and Xander says: "Mad? Just because you ran away and abandoned your post and your friends and your mom and made him lay awake every night worrying about you?" then turns to Oz and Willow and says, "Maybe we should wait out here." In Spanish, as far as I can tell, the first part's the same, but he finishes up with "I don't think so," instead of "maybe we should wait out here." Which, if you ask me, is not nearly as funny.

Or there's the scene where Buffy's Mom has invited "Willow and Mr. Giles and everybody" over for dinner, and asks Buffy to go get the "company plates." To which Buffy replies, "Mom, Willow and everybody aren't company-plate people. They're normal-plate people." Only in Spanish, she says something like, "Mom, Willow and my friends aren't just guests, they're my friends!" Is it just me, or are the connotations there almost entirely different?

It all makes me quite glad I speak English. It also makes me wonder just how much I'm missing when I do watch things that are dubbed from other languages...