Welcome to the boards, Kri-El
And yes, as LabRat mentioned, I've already groaned ad lib about the French version of Lois & Clark. Like you, my first brush with the show was in my first language, and I didn't see a single original episode until long after I was hooked and already writing fanfic. At last I found a tiny shop in Paris where the guy said he could order the tapes for me (I didn't even know they were available at the time) and I completed the collection thanks to some very generous German FoLCs, who agreed to copy their tapes for me.
I didn't truly know what I was missing until I saw episodes in English. Until then, I loved the show but I thought that some scenes were very badly played, and some lines made no sense. I didn't blame it on the dubbing until I realised what sort of ridiculous mistakes they had made. Rat mentions the teddy, and yes, I think it's their most outrageous one. In Soulmates, teddy got translated to the French equivalent of "teddy bear" - one might wonder why the heck Clark would feel *so* eager to fly back to Lois's apartment for a forgotten teddy bear!
There was also a lot of emotion that got lost through the dubbing process. It can't really be otherwise, I guess, since dubbers just stand in front of a screen and read their text without truly *acting* it. It's much harder to think of yourself as the character when you're not truly playing it. It was particularly obvious in emotional scenes of course, or even when they kissed (yes, they dubbed the kissing, too, which I think I find quite hilarious - you don't expect kissing to sound any different in a foreign language... though the mumbled words have to be translated, so I suppose that made sense
).
As for titles, looks like it's a department where we were lucky. They either tried to translate the meaning but use French colloquialisms, or they made small references to movie titles. For example, Tempus Fugitive became "Retour vers le Passe" (wink to the French title of "Back to the Future", which was "Retour vers le futur"). The Rival Became "Une Star est nee" (A Star is Born), which I think was a clever title. So it wasn't too bad.
Nevertheless, even though I still keep my French tapes for memory's sake, they don't appeal any more, and I much prefer the version in English.
Lois & Clark reinforced my dislike of translated versions as a whole, whether it's in movies or in books.
Kaethel
